Hear, hear and Amen!

I personally would rather have an actively updated restoration page than a roster page. There are many sites that have great looking rosters, but have not updated a status on their collections for years. Showing enthusastic volunteers working toward the greater good makes others look forward to volunteering. Happy volunteers breed more volunteers, and the more volunteers, the more that can be accomplished.

Ted.

CMS's can be great, but be aware depending how they are implemented, they can hinder a search engine from indexing your website, which in turn can drive down the number of visitors and usefulness of the site, be a roster, restoration section or visitor's information. Googling google and CMS and other similar things will find you lots of technical information on the subject.

Bob

True, but website hit counters don't necessarily reflect what you want, or which pages are doing the most good for your organization. For instance if your organization is very dependent on volunteers, a few good pages on the volunteer experience might get very few page views, but they would be from people very likely to become needed volunteers. You might find one page view of your volunteer page is worth 1000 page views of your train ride page.

This can be even more acute if you've done some sloppy search engine optimization, for instance the recently discussed hypothetical of a tourist railway getting to #1 for the query "steam trains". That would bring lots of visitors who aren't really looking for what you have to offer. That's an example of something also true in the general case: doubling your site traffic doesn't necessarily mean doubling of useful results.

True, but other CMS's do a very good job of optimizing for search. MediaWiki does a good job and Wordpress or Movable Type (both blogs) do a fabulous job, even to the point of stuffing the URL with keywords, as in
www.myblog.com/2008/02/These-are-all-th ... -title.php

Have the courtesy to provide some kind of listing of the major artifacts in your collection. Major can be by size or significance.

I like the approach of the California State Railroad Museum website (http://www.csrmf.org/)which is maintained by its supporting foundation (not by the State). This approach is to provide a multi-paragraph description of the "favorite" cars or locomotives with photos -- these are generally the cars and locomotives actively displayed in its exhibit hall. Then there are available lists of all car, locomotives, etc. in the collection that provide just the basic information of road, number, kind, built date, donation, etc. date.

This is the entrance portal to the information: Library & Collections

Brian,

Good point. Even if there is no detailed list available, a highlight page is fills both needs. I know with the Connecticut Trolley Museum, there is a large amount of in formation about the collection that is currently under restoration on the restoration page, but a highlight page showing the cars currently in service would allow a visitor planning a trip to have an idea of what cars are operating and that can build excitement for the younger ones, it adds to the pre-trip planning. The same could be said for school groups.

Ted.

folks,

A roster is always welcome. I guess I am a roster junky. I send information and pictures to Frank Hicks for his North American preserved cars web site; which is the ultimate roster, showing the whole traction preservation industry.

It is always better to have more information available than less; whatever kind of Preservation you are interested in.

The Western Railway Museum has a two part list. Showing car barn one and the cars that are right in view. Then a couple of more clicks you can get to some illustrated data sheets which show every car in the collection, even down to some that are on the property as rolling storage buildings.

Of course pictures of the cars are welcome, historic ones, are even better. Especially when the car has changed a lot in its often long life.

Ted Miles

I'm rather curious, make that frustrated, as to why the B&O Museum doesn't have a roster online. Clicking the "What's Here" link reveals a page bragging of the collections' size and uniqueness, but no complete (or even partial) listing that I can find. Not even a few lines to brag about the highlights of the collection.

Whoever created the web site obviously knows what they're doing. For a nationally-known museum like that not to have a roster of its equipment online defies logic.

Since I'm on the subject, I thought the Reading Tech online roster was very well done. Can't wait to see what the GP35 looks like when she's finished.

Disclaimer: I'm not with the B&O RR Museum nor a member.

Short, potentially smart-alecked answer: They have so darned much stuff.

Potentially cynical answer: An online roster would cut into sales of whatever roster they sell in the gift shop. (I know the RR Museum of Pa. used to sell a four-page fine-print roster sheet for 25 or 50 scents, years ago.)

Potentially uncomfortable answer: There is a lot of "flux" and flexibility going on in the roster, and they may not want to be caught in the situation of having to explain why something that was on that roster is not there now (in restoration shop, in a far-off siding, over on another railroad, traded to another place, scrapped, etc.).

To be fair, a lot of other places (IRM, NRM Green Bay, CSRM, Seashore, etc.) would have almost identical problems across the board.

One of the least understood and underused parts of Web design is keyword meta tags. I'm bad about underusing keywords myself. Most of the CMS's I've used have fields where you can enter keywords. I almost never take the time to enter any, and I realize that's not good. I keep meaning to go back and fill in the keywords, but...

I wonder how much a CMS designed specifically for railroad museums would be used? What features, besides a basic info front page and a searchable roster, would it need?

I wouldn't fret too much about keyword meta tags now-a-days. Google, among other modern search engines, rank meta tags well below other criteria such as number of links from other sites pointing to yours. Back when Alta-Vista was king, meta tags were important.

Anyway, for a small museum web site, http://tmny.org has more content than most and is updated frequently. It has a full roster, it is dial-up and mobile device friendly. We've even recently been listing our entire catalog of archived photos, postcards and books.

I just looked at the February stats for our webpage http://www.dctrolley.org.

Beside the homepage, the top four pages viewed by number of hits:
1. Schedule
2. Streetcar Ride (fares)
3. Collections
4. Events

There was a significant drop from the hits for Schedule to the hits for Streetcar Ride with those next three grouped fairly close together.

Curiously the link (not search engine) that is directing the highest number of folks to the page is the DC Transit page at http://www.clouse.org, a site on the Urban Exploration Ring. The rest of the links come mostly from websites focused on area activities for children.

Visits and view statistics peak each week over the weekend when we are open. There is also a discernable increase for the weekend of our recent special event in February, as was also the case forthe days leading up to a special event in January. The top four pages viewed remained the same in both months.

Wesley

If you do have a section of the website describing what cars you have available to run for the public, you must be careful about the wording. If it says on your website, for example, "The following cars are available to ride at our museum", or something of the sort, people may expect that they will be able to ride each and every car on the list. About a year ago, something similar happened at our museum. A family came to the museum after visiting our booth at a fair. The member staffing the booth told them what cars run at the museum and showed them pictures. The guests came into the gift shop after riding the two cars available to ride that day annoyed that we only rotated between two of the cars that were shown to them at the fair. If a list of operating cars is put on your website, make certain that there is some form of disclaimer stating that not all of the cars on the website are run every day (unless they are all run, every day).