As some of you know I have been building a model railroad of the Tonopah and Tidewater RR and the other pre-WW I Nevada mining railroads based on David Myrick’s books Railroads of Nevada and Eastern California. These are not popular railroads for modeling and getting data about them has involved considerable research. Most were abandoned before WW II and are out in the middle of the desert.
I notice that there are some model railroads that have their own websites and I am thinking about doing that for mine. It would have data, pictures, trackplans and links to Nevada ghost town/ railroad websites. The idea would be to present what I have done and help other that might be interested in modeling these roads.
For those of you that have websites for your model railroad I have a number of questions. How do you go about doing it? Is there software that you need? How expensive is it? Are their cheap ways of doing it? How hard is it to maintain the site? Was it worth the work? Has there been any unforseen problems? Would you do it again? Thanks - Nevin
If you need help with your pictures I can do that for you. I have worked many years as a Photoshop teacher and webdesigner so pictures are my speciality. I can also give you some advice how to build the website.
I would recommend using Photoshop and Dreamweaver. If someone tells you to use Frontpage or Word, run the fastest you can in the other direction… If you are really serious about this, get a domain with your own name, not very expensive. You will not only get your own url, you will also get the same url in your email address. For example:
Google offers free website hosting, nothing really fancy but works fairly good. It is mostly self instructed, not very difficult. See my photo website in my signature.
There are many free web site hosting companies out there. (too many to name) Most have some type of simple to use software so you don’t need to know how to write html code. I’ve used Trelix site builder tools and it was REAL simple. I would just say make sure your hosting service supports “click to enlarge” for your photos. It always bums me out to see tiny pictures that you can’t enlarge.
It’s really not harder than using the forum to form a post.
You can actually create a fairly good website in a short time using his tutorials.
Or
You can also create a document in Microsoft Word and tell it to save as an HTML page.
Next
You will need a service provider which supports web page hosting. (ie: Comcast) Contact yours and see if they can send you in the proper direction. You’ll need to transfer html / htm files from your computer to theirs.
I use Microsoft Front Page for mine. For me it is not hard to maintain. The costs are generally for hosting the site. There are many options for this so prices vary. It is definetly worth the effort for me. No real problems and I would do it again.
I’m using FrontPage 2000 to author our site…You have to shop around to find the best deals on hosting. Being “El Cheapo”, Our site is hosted by Yahoo Geocities…I hate all the throttled bandwidth and ads, but sooner or later, I’ll find the time to move it…for right now it’s free.
The only problem with Geocites is the bandwidth…if you’ve got many photos, it locks you out for a time (as I remember, it’s about 1 hour)…I’ve learned to store pics somewhere else, and keep the photos on the site to a minimum.
I can’t really explain much about how my website is hosted, since I don’t want to step on MR’s no advertising rule. My site is hosted by a vendor specializing in PRR model trains (the host is an N scale PRR guy like me). In return I have banners for PRR groups and venders across the top. Thankfully it’s very non-intrusive and fits in with my PRR theme.
My ISP (Earthlink) provided the “template” software (Trellix) and web space (10MB) for my web site FREE with my monthly rate. (Your main ISP web page should have info as to whether they provide this or not.) The templates are nice but, obviously, limiting to creativity. Maintaining the site on dialup is ponderous at times but managable. Uploading pictures also takes time.
Unforeseen problems? Since this was my first web site, I didn’t have enough “foresee” ahead of time to know better. So I dove right in and played around with things until I came up with a design I liked. Like I said, the templates are limiting but they do give you immediate structure and guidelines. There are things that I would like to do differently with my web site. But, because I lack the needed knowledge, I’m sorta stuck at the moment. For me, it’s been worth the effort and time that I’ve put into it.
Design is the biggest aspect of putting together any web site. Here are a few questions that you’ll need/want to ask yourself ahead of time BEFORE you start:
What will be the focus/theme of my web site?
How am I going to “present” that focus? Headings, sub-headings, pictures, links, placement of the aforementioned, etc. are all important to presentation.
What do I want to accomplish with my web site? This again goes back to focus.
If I were a visitor to my own web site, is it intuitive and easily navigatable? Or, are things “buried” and hard to find or get to? “Clickable” links will help in this process.
Obviously, these are not all the questions that you need to answer but it will get you started.
Would I do it again? Absolutely! I’ve enjoyed the things/skills that I’ve learned along the way and I look forward to improving upon them in my next
I used to put up everything for my layout on one page. I’ve since divided it up into a page on my Lionel trains, a page on my old layout, and the pages for the current layout.
Mine is a freebee from peoplepc , same as earthlink I believe , small amount of space and very limited software. But I don’t need much , and free is good.
My site is hosted on 1&1, and it costs about $40 a year. I have it tied to my commercial website, so it all gets paid for by the business. I also administer another site, for which I bill enough to cover it and mine. (Ain’t America great!?!)
I use SnippetMaster Lite to edit and update… which I should probably do soon…
No…in fact the Mac’s lend themselves equally as well to web authoring…My daughter uses one in her line of work. I author mine in Linux as well as Windows (I use VMware in Ubuntu Linux sometimes instead of switching operating systems when I need to use Frontpage)
Yes! President Gates passed legislation banning them forever. You are in direct violation of the Microsoft prime directive. Report to an authorised Microsoft reprogramming center with said “Mac” immediately for disciplinary action!
I own the website HOseeker.net. It is not to difficult to build a website from scratch if you have basic knowledge of a good photo shop and web building program. This can get expensive.
First you need a Web Page Builder,ftp, and Picture Editing Programs, I use Dreamweaver, Paintshop Pro and Adobe Photoshop. I downloaded a ftp program from the internet.
Second you need a Hosting Company with a server. Prices are different depending on what the Hosting company provides and packages available.
I found that the ftp and webbuilding packages supplied by my hosting company are not as easy to use as Dreamweaver. I would also stay away from front page it is difficult to understand. Also, a number of the free web building sites on the internet do not supply enough storage space for photos and do not supply enough ban width. But this depends on how big your new Website will be. I tried building HOseeker.net on a free hosting website and rain out of storage space very quickly. They may supply more now.
If you do go with building a website a hosting company you will give you the options to build Photo Galleries, chat rooms, forums, stores, etc.
To the question of maintaining the site, if there are a lot of updates and the sites becomes large and visited often, yes it is time consuming.