The State Trek is an online license plate game that I thought up a few years ago and eventually made into a website. Although it's a family friendly game it's really more for grown ups. The people I have doing it say it's a lot of fun. It's not anything like the traditional license plate game that kids play in the car on long trips. I built it using .Net 2010 with AJAX. It was a lot of work. Please let me know if anyone has any suggestions...
Your white text gets lost in the snowy tree background image. Other than that it's a fine site. Simple and easy to navigate, and to me those are the most important things. One side note, and maybe it's just me, but I'm turned off by Google ads in sites. If your visitor numbers get to a point that it makes sense to advertise, there are a lot of options open to you. But I don't know, there's something about those generic Google ads on a brand new site that rubs me the wrong way. Again, maybe it's just me, but they taint my perception of a site. When I see them I tend to think, "Okay, I see this site was just put up to make me click on these ads. No thanks."
The dark navy blue color should stand out nicely against your background image. You may want to consider that as the colors for those links. And why make Forgot your password a link. Maybe it should also be a button?
Thanks for the nice comments and suggestions!! The text over the picture is really tricky. If it's not white it looks like it's part of the picture. I can brighten or lighten it a little, but I may have to be more selective on pictures. Please tell me if today's picture looks better. As far as the ads, I'm not really looking for ad revenue. But since it is a subscription website I was afraid I would not look legitimate if I didn't have them. I also changed some of the wording on the front page to convey that this is a game for grown ups. Most of the people who looked at the game thought it was the traditional game that kids play in the back seat of the car on long road trips. Programming this website was a challege. Getting the right message across may prove to be an even greater challenge. Thanks again!! Mike
You've hit on the ultimate truth there. Creating something in the online world is about 10% of the job. The other 90% is getting the world to find it, understand it and use it.