Published July 2001

KinderStart.com designed with parents in mind

By Kimberly Hilden
Herald Business Journal Assistant Editor

“Because kids don’t come with instructions” there’s KinderStart.com.

At least that’s the underlying premise and motto of the online search engine (www.kinderstart.com) geared toward parents and caregivers, said Victor Goodman, a parent himself.

“My son is now 19 years old ... so I’ve been through this. When he was young (he) would be sick or something, and there was no place to go” to access information quickly, said Goodman, who lives in Southern California.

With the advent of the Internet, there was a lot of information for child-rearing, but it was “disjointed and unorganized,” he said.

So Goodman took his experience in education — he holds a doctorate in education from the University of California at Los Angeles — and his decade in the computer field and created KinderStart.com, an indexed directory of Web sites pertaining to rearing kids from birth to 7 years of age.

The site includes 16 categories for specific searches, including Adoption, Bringing Home Baby, Family Dynamics, Health/Medical/Dental, Learning Activities & Crafts, and Travel & Vacations. Visitors also can request a general search for various topics.

How is the site different from every other site?

“We’re a handmade directory,” Goodman said. “We go in and search, ... find good sites and put them in the right category.”

Which means a parent searching for information about children’s nutrition won’t have to wade through hundreds of sites that may have nothing to do with children at all.

The site, which went live last August, is built by professionals in the field of education as well as parents, who are hired by KinderStart on a temporary basis to index Web sites in areas of their expertise, Goodman said.

Users also can suggest sites through the “Add a Site” function, but every site is reviewed by staff before it’s put on the site, Goodman said. Currently, about 7 percent of the indexed sites have been suggested by visitors.

Since going live, the site has been growing in popularity, Goodman said, with page views doubling every month and now approaching 2 million monthly.

To keep people coming back, the site has added “sticky” links to stock tracking, movies and maps, and users can make KinderStart.com their home page, too.

Then there’s the “Kids’ Playground,” which KinderStart.com recently established on its site to provide educational games for kids. Partners on that project include Golden Books, Kids Edge and BlueCow.com, among others.

With its indexed information and games for children, parents have a real resource in KinderStart.com, Goodwin said. “Literally, you can raise a kid from KinderStart.” he said.

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