Wildly Seen Adventures

Researching a zoo before you visit usually means choosing between the facility's own marketing copy and a pile of one-line star ratings from people who may never have walked through the gate. Wildly Seen Adventures takes a different route. Every facility gets a first-hand visit on video, and every visitor is invited to score that facility on the same three criteria: care, purpose, and experience.

Two rating systems run in parallel and are deliberately never blended. WSA's Official Score is the site's own assessment. The Trailblazer Score is the running average of visitor submissions through the public scorecard. Keeping them separate means you can see exactly where the reviewer and the visiting public disagree, which is often the most useful thing on the page. Both appear side by side in the community rankings leaderboard.

Underneath the whole site is a Cloudflare D1 database holding 199 locations with coordinates, hours, contact details, species spotlights, visit tips, and verdicts. Individual review pages are generated from that data. So is the map, the rankings board, the search index, and the sitemap. Adding one location to the database adds it everywhere at once, with no page duplication and no manual sitemap editing.

The site also installs as an app. A web manifest and service worker make it a full progressive web app, which matters more than it sounds when someone is standing in a parking lot on spotty signal trying to decide whether a place is worth the admission price.