July 31st, 2001

Sakura Star
http://www.cardcaptorz.com
(7 stars)

Design and Layout:
The design for this site is great! The colors really complement each other and the top image graphic has a glowing quality about it. It loads up pretty quick and it's also centered and size-fixed, thereby preventing it from messing up on different resolutions. But I don't know, it's still the same layout, just a variation, like on all the other CCS and CC sites. Originality has to factor in here somewhere.
1 out of 2 stars

Organization:
The sidebar. This is probably the top complaint among the SSI community. Why is there this need to make sure that every link on your site is on you main side bars? I can't help but feel that organization would make a lot more sense if it was

Series Information
  Characters
  Episode Guide
  Movies

as opposed to giving each character a link on the main sidebar along with having really small sections included. Some things can fit on the same page you know.
1 out of 2 stars

Advertising and Broken links:
I only ran into pop-ups on the main page. After that, it was smooth sailing. As far as broken links go, once again, there weren't any. Sites are gradually improving it would seem.
2 out of 2 stars

Content:
Hey now, this is more like it. They actually have content. There are thorough character descriptions, as well as images of each of the characters right along with it. They also have a very complete section on the Japanese seiyuu, which includes pictures of each of them. Oh yeah... 250 screenshots from 1:20 of film? Isn't that a bit excessive? Especially since they're too small for anyone to use as web graphics...

There's also a pretty good selection of songs from the American version of the series in Real media format. That's something I don't see on too many sites. And there image galleries are pretty good too. I especially like the fact that the images open in a new window. I really wish more sites would do that. But I'm a bit confused as to why all the images are in *.ART format. There are some browsers out there that can't see those files.
1 out of 2 stars

Overall:
This is kind of random, but I really like the fact that all the written information has little credits at the bottom. And if they didn't know where a summary came from and stole it anyway, they at least said they didn't know. It's not like on other sites where they just try to pass it off as something they wrote themselves. But I suspect that it's because of the whole incident with Cherry Blossoms. This site also doesn't seem to be all about profit like so many other large sites. They don't even try to sell stuff via amazon.com or have a ton of "Please support us" banners. And I like it.
2 out of 2 stars

Sakura Star has earned a total of 7 stars! And by my rating standards, that's really good. Not to mention, this site was one of the first ones out there with the American release. But why was it gone for so long?