One more suggestion. You do have a copyright text at the bottom of every page, right? If not, why not?

Make sure it has the current year. Nothing makes info look out of date quicker than "Copyright 2014" at the bottom of the page.

This only applies to the text at the bottom of the pages, for photos etc, it should be the original publication date.

I just changed the title of this thread to clarify my meaning.

I had originally titled the thread: "Does a professionally-made website pay for itself?". My intention was to ask whether hiring a professional to do the work is an investment that pays for itself.

I realize now that it could be interpreted to mean, "does presenting your group professionally pay off," which is not what I meant to say.

Sorry for my poor phrasing.

The definitive answer is: It depends....

If your website is to be informative only, then maybe if it brings in enough paying patrons to your facility. If it's a profit center selling tickets, tee shirts and tchochkes, then again, maybe if you sell enough items. Up front costs for initial design can get high depending on how many pages and bells & whistles. Then you have a costs for maintaining the site with updates to keep it relevant. If you have a large organization with decent cash flow then consider it a cost of doing business and the outlay is easier to swallow. With a small organization, it can be a significant chunk of your budget. The good news is that domain names and web hosting are pretty cheap.

So, it's an impossible question to answer without knowing a lot of details. I'd suggest contacting some firms and sit down with them, discuss your needs and get some quotes for basic, decent and whiz-bang sites. Don't forget their hourly rate for updates. Only then can you make an informed decision.

As stated previously, it helps immensely if you have a web developer/designer on-board and can do it in-house. Some of us on RYPN are developers so the cost is nil for our organizations. Lacking that, you can also take a look at content management systems (CMS) like Word Press, Joomla!, Drupal, etc. A pro can set it up (or you can learn) and then you can add content at will. Or look at web builder sites like Wix, etc. that you can set up yourself and pay a monthly fee. Depends on your budget.

I do feel professionally obligated to say yes...

Agreed. If you want a site that looks good and and is guaranteed to function well, a pro is definitely the better way to go. That said, you really do have to have a web presence no matter the cost. It's the way today's generation finds things.

Depends. If a location is openly stated on a website, any website, customers will go there and expect a train ride. The problem is if you ever depart from more than one location. When customers are driving to your train, many of them just use the map-nav in their phone or car, speak "West Wimberly and Northern location" and beeline to wherever their car tells them to.

If that answer is too easily found, 20% of your riders will go there. Then the phone blows up. And whose fault is this? Not theirs... yours. Not you, BobHarbison, they have no earthly idea which website misled them and they lack the skill to distinguish the official website from others - trust me, I've had this conversation dozens of times. It's the railroad's fault for allowing that website to publish misinformation. And the railroad has to issue the refund or get the chargeback and social media tantrum.

I have no idea how to solve that problem, I just know it's big.



... and that's... why you do phone sales.

Once a year a ticketing company will call wanting to do a 20-minute competitive bake-off on features, web integration, numbers and splits. I stop them and ask how phone sales work. They gush about their easy, smooth web interface for our phone operators because their service doesn't include a call center. I tell them that's a showstopper feature, and that's the end of the conversation.

You know it's funny, but the truth is, you must do both.
I don't want to ever have to call someone to purchase something that should just as easily be purchased online.

Yeah, sorry, I didn't think to say "online ticketing of course", because if you're in the business, it goes without saying. It is simply not human-labor-wise possible to do ticketing *without* online ticketing, and believe me, the diehards in two of my organizations had tested this to the absolute limits.

The insidious thing is that the face-planting abject fail of not doing online ticketing is absoutely invisible to people who don't yet do it. The status quo feels like safe comfortable normal... and the legions of people who tell them to get online can be dismissed as "those Facebookers". Online ticketing is hard, a big change, and seems like such a gamble. My first month going online, I was chewing my fingernails off...

How do you sell tickets for your railroad without disclosing the location(s)? I don't mean that you must provide an address that can be input into a GPS. I'm talking about train rides, museums and model railroad shops that do not even tell you what city and state there in!

As for how you solve the problem? It seems pretty simple to me. You state that you have multiple locations.

Come and ride the Whoville and Western! We offer departures from two locations, Whoville New York and Whereville New Jersey. Please consult our schedule for exact location and information on which trains each location offers.

Or, you could just find a railroad that departs from multiple locations and see what they do. For example:



Clearly states the locations, while also making it clear they offer more than one departure point. Seems logical enough.

On the event page. The full address is there, maps, etc. If someone goes to an address for a different event, tough potatoes but that doesn't happen. At least they don't complain.


We do, loudly, and people still go "why don't you put your address on the homepage". They only care about one of our addresses. Mind you these people usually aren't customers but observers who want their expectations fulfilled.

Well, I can't speak for your demanding costumers, I can only respond to what I said, which was, and still is "Where is the railroad? (must include state)." I feel that your location, which is not the same as your address, should be clearly shown on the very first page, above the fold. If there's more than one location, that's fine, say that.

For the vast majority of your customers, that is critical decision making information, and the first thing they want to know. I live in Seattle. You could be having free Easter train rides next weekend, with free baskets full of Cadbury eggs, but if you're located in Florida, I'm not bringing the Grandkids over for a ride. So the first question I have is "Where are you?"

It's the world wide web. People have no idea where your operation is. I keep seeing ads on FB for the "West Coast Wilderness Railway" offering engineer for a day program. Thinking "What the heck, that line under years ago?!?" I clicked on the ad. Turns out I was thinking of the Pacific Wilderness Railway, which was on Vancouver Island. West Coast Wilderness Railway is alive and well, and apparently has a nifty guest engineer program. They're a bit out of my area though, what with being in Tasmania.

By the way, no matter what you do on your website, somebody will tell you that you're doing it wrong, just like with everything else on a tourist railway.

The best approach, in my opinion, is to create a website that will quickly and efficiently give accurate and useful information to the majority of your guests. Somebody will complain you don't have enough info, while somebody else will complain it's too complicated. When the two complaints are about even in number, you're probably at the sweet spot.

In know it is essential to have a good on-line ticket sales page on your organization's wbsite, but here is one thing I learned back in the 1990s with the Golden Gate railroad Museum (then located in Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in san Francisco, CA) when we ran the Gilroy Garlic trains: we hired Ticketmaster to sell tickets, but we soon learned that most people who called Ticketmaster wanted more info and needed to be sold on riding the Garlic Train. That is not what any on-line ticket page can do. Only friendly and well-informed people can do that -- that is, convince people to ride your train. And unless your train rides regularly sell out, you need those friendly and well-informed folks to sell tickets. You will never know how many people did not ride your trains because they were not able to talk to a friendly, well-informed person who could sell them on the idea of riding your train.

I know one of the biggest pet peeves I have with museum sites especially is up to date information on equipment that they have in the collection. No matter the condition even the crap on the back lot that is rusting to nothing. Having to rely on third party websites for roster information is confusing and inaccurate as hell.

You may just get a few more railfans to visit or even volunteer if they know ol' 97 is out back hiding in the weeds. I have learned one thing by monitoring several railfan boards misinformation about equipment spreads like wildfire. I have had to clean up the mess at least 3 times in the last month stating that some of our equipment is abandoned and the tracks are ripped up cause they can't see them from google maps due to weeds.

Many of you know that once there is perception that a piece of equipment is abandoned on xyz siding out in BFE that the souvenir hunters are soon to follow.

I'm kinda on the fence on that one. While we have some interesting stuff at our second facility that could draw in more volunteers and I'd like to get it posted online, the flip side is that once the uninformed souvenir hunters know where/what it is, there will be more trespassers than we have already. We've had the horns stolen off the 471. That was a nice surprise....