Test drive new Siskiyou Line web site

[jfugate]

***Announcement***

My new and improved Siskiyou Line layout website is available for a test drive! The new site sports a more streamlined look, and allows you to post comments on pages if you like.

Just go here to my staging area and give it a try:
http://mymemoirs.net/e107/


For a larger view, click here.

I encourage you to try out the site search, and to browse the new photo albums I'm now using for picture presentation.

There's more that could be said, but this announcement is long enough as it is. I'm trying to make the site as useful as possible, and moving to the new design makes it easier than ever for me to post new material.

[SpaceMouse]

Looking good Joe. The scenery workshop is well condensed and reads well. I wi***he photos would enlarge to get a better look at your technique.

[Anonymous]

Joe,

A great layout and a great site. I have to find time to go back for more than a short test drive. For now better get back to work and make out some quotes the clients are clamouring for. Work is such a hindrance to enjoying trains.

[MAbruce]

Joe: Nice work! It’s an interesting site with a lot of material and pictures to go through.

Minor suggestions/errors:

On your home page, the navigation selections at the top are in plain type. Perhaps these should be altered in appearance so they look like something you can click on.

Spelling error under “Photos” sub link: ‘Contruction’ should be ‘construction’.

The date at the top of the ‘What’s New’ page reads April 15th, but the update is from May.

But overall – nice job!

[cwclark]

looking good joe...chuck

[pcarrell]

Hi Joe,

The new site looks great. It has a better feel and is easier to navigate. I'm sure there are still some tweaks left to do here and there, but you're lookin' good.

I noticed on the lighting page that there was a "click here" link that wasn't working and also on the shadow box page it mentions some scenery to the left, but there wasn't a link to see it. Those were a couple of minor things I noted, but these are just nit-picky things in an overall great site.

The old site is very good. I use it all the time. Matter of fact, I was there yesterday using it as an example of how to do something as I tried to show a friend a technique. This site will be easier to navigate and so it will be even more useful.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you for all you contribute to this hobby and for all the time you put into this to share like you do. You are a true ambassador for the hobby and you really should get that recognition. I know that's not why you do it (for the accolades) and that is why you deserve it all the more. Thank you for all that you do.

[n2mopac]

Joe,

I've enjoyed your site and your help for some time. The new site looks great. I look forwasrd to exploring it more thoroughly.

Ron

[SilverSpike]

Great job on the new web site! Web site design is one of my side jobs, and I am learning new PHP techniques to add to my skills set. Congratulations on the site. I have always enjoyed your web site, and will continue to visit.

Also, I understand that you are the new webmaster for the Layout Design site on Yahoo Groups. Congratulations on that too!

Cheers,

Ryan

[jfugate]

Everyone:

Thanks for the great comments on the site, and for any bug reports. I am always glad to get any glitches pointed out so I can fix them.

I encourage you to take advantage of the new ability to post comments on pages and to rate pages. I'd like to roll out the site update with some comments and ratings already in place!

Ryan:
The new site is driven by an open source (free!) content management system called e107 that's written in PHP. All the site navigation, the site search, the ability to post comments on pages, the photo album, the calendar, and a host of other goodies all come "out of the box" with e107. And as a content management system, I can post changes to pages over the web directly in a few moments and voila! Page changed without having to dink with any HTML on my local machine, upload the changes with FTP, etc.

It's possible to assign various pages to different content owners and non-technical people can maintain their own pages if you have a site owned by a lot of different people -- I'm hoping to migrate the Layout Design SIG web site to something like this, so I'm experimenting with it on my own web site (and other sites) first.

As you may have guessed, I am a senior web developer for a large corporation and am one of the people responsible for their product support web pages -- so I am very picky about having a professional looking web presence for my layout.

I am a firm believer a layout web site should be as informative as possible and have a good balance between photos and text. Web pages with just text are squandering the internet, and pages with just photos and not much in the way of captions just leave you feeling like a starving man going to a banquet and all they served was cheese and crackers. [swg]

[SilverSpike]

Joe,

Balance is the key, and multimedia on the Internet is an amazing resource.

Also, thanks for the e107 lead, I am going to give it a look see.

Cheers,

Ryan

[jfugate]

By the way, for anyone who may be interested, I have a topic called "All about Model RR website construction" here at this link on my new site:

http://mymemoirs.net/e107/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?153.0#post_154

It covers a lot of insights on how to make a good layout web site, and some of my own opinions as a professional web guy as to what makes a good web site. [swg]

[jfugate]

Thanks to everyone who took the time to visit my staging site and to email me comments. Based on the comments I've made several modifications to the site to make it easier to use.

Several people commented about how tall the header image was ... if your screen resolution is not very large, you would often have to scroll down all the time just to see the content. I shortened the height of the header image by almost an inch and it works much better, I think.

Others commented on the difficulty of navigating the photo album -- again it was a height issue. The photo album came up with a bunch of unnecessary buttons at the top so I simply shut those off. Now you can see most photos without scrolling down and can easily move back and forth between them.

Also it was noted the captions on the thumbnail images as too small and blocky, making the text hard to read. I unbolded the caption text, and made the font bigger. Now I think the thumbnail captions are much easier to read.

Opening up the website to allow anyone to post comments didn't take long to manifest my one fear -- people abusing the priviledge.

One gentleman posted some rather unkind comments about how "CMS" is like the cool thing of the week and everyone's got to have one -- implying that I'm doing this just to be cool and join in the fad of the week. He said (in so many words) that using a content management system was unnecessary since this is just a model train website for crying out loud. And finally he said I didn't even pick a good CMS.

The guy was pretty mean-spirited in his posted comment -- so I just deleted it. If someone came into my living room and started badmouthing my approach to things in this way -- you can bet he'd find himself back out on the street.

I consider my website to be my property, and while I don't mind criticism, I can't abide mean-spirited people. I can understand it when Kalmbach takes that stand on here -- this is their turf and they can manage it as they see fit.

Anyhow, thanks for all your valuable input -- it's much appreciated and will help make the new-and-improved Siskiyou Line website as good as it can be. [swg]

[selector]

It seems that people's true personalities come forth when on the web.

Joe, I just had a cursory glance at the page that opened with the link you provided, and it is almost overwhelming. I'll have to go back when I'm not in "spring" mode, but let me just say that this is quite an undertaking, and I hope you get all the satisfaction and visiting from it that you had antiicpated....the odd butthole not withstanding.

-Crandell

[jfugate]

Yes, there can be a lot to setting up and maintaing a model layout web site.

Being able to post more content to my site is one of the reasons I went with this new "Content Management" software.

To post to my site before (anyone who has maintained web pages know the drill), I had to fire up the page editor, get all the content built, fire up the FTP program, upload all the content, take a look see, go back to the page editor, fix the glitches, reupload the changed pages, and take another look.

Now I just browse to the site, log in, and browse to the page I want to change, click the edit link (which shows since I'm the page admin), make the changes in the browser, and save them. DONE.

Want to add photos? After logging in, just click the upload image link on the page (since I'm the page admin), browse to the location where the image is on my local box, and click it. Whammo, zammo, image uploaded, with a mid-sized image created automatically that won't blast out the page load time, and an automatic thumbnail created as well. Then I just edit the page and drop in the image using the [img] bbcode on the page content (pick thumb or mid-size). The image gets an automatic click to see the full sized image included, no extra effort.

In short, I did this all *because* I don't have as much time as I would like to fiddle-dink around with all the steps needed to make even a small change to my pages. Now I can edit any page directly with a few clicks.

Much easier! [swg]

[Anonymous]

I'm pretty excited about this. I had no idea it was so easy. Not all computer guys know web design. :) Looking forward to putting something together. By the way the site has always been informative.

QUOTE: Originally posted by jfugate

Yes, there can be a lot to setting up and maintaing a model layout web site.

Being able to post more content to my site is one of the reasons I went with this new "Content Management" software.

To post to my site before (anyone who has maintained web pages know the drill), I had to fire up the page editor, get all the content built, fire up the FTP program, upload all the content, take a look see, go back to the page editor, fix the glitches, reupload the changed pages, and take another look.

Now I just browse to the site, log in, and browse to the page I want to change, click the edit link (which shows since I'm the page admin), make the changes in the browser, and save them. DONE.

Want to add photos? After logging in, just click the upload image link on the page (since I'm the page admin), browse to the location where the image is on my local box, and click it. Whammo, zammo, image uploaded, with a mid-sized image created automatically that won't blast out the page load time, and an automatic thumbnail created as well. Then I just edit the page and drop in the image using the [img] bbcode on the page content (pick thumb or mid-size). The image gets an automatic click to see the full sized image included, no extra effort.

In short, I did this all *because* I don't have as much time as I would like to fiddle-dink around with all the steps needed to make even a small change to my pages. Now I can edit any page directly with a few clicks.

Much easier! [swg]