A recent experience brought home something the tourist railway industry also struggles with.

I've recently become a fan of Tall Ships, as I think they make wonderful photography subjects. I've been following two of the local ships around the area, the Lady Washington and the Hawaiian Chieftain. They have a nice website, and the schedule is easy to find, so you can tell where the ships are. Following these two ships has created an broader interest in sailing ships.

Yesterday, on the way into work, I noticed there was a Tall Ship down by the docks in Tacoma. It wasn't either of the two ships I've been following, since they're both in San Francisco. I think I know what ship it was, but I'm not positive. I saw it again at lunch, sailing around the bay. So, today after work, I tried to stop by and see what's up, maybe they're in town for the weekend, I might want to go on a cruise, etc etc.

When I arrived, the ship was nowhere to be seen, and there was no info available. I don't know if they sailed back to their home port, or were simply out on a cruise again. I have no idea if they'll be back soon, or this was the last visit of the year.

So... what's the moral for railroad museums? Well, if you "search and replace" Tall Ship with Steam Train, that could probably describe many museum's special events.

I'm not a true ship foamer, so I don't hang out on "CaptainsOrders.com" or "SeaPictures.net" (if they even exist). I'm sure there's folks out there who could tell me exactly where that ship was going and when, who built it, what year the sails are from and what the name of the captain's parrot is. But to the average person, they just sort of randomly appear in town, and dissapear in the same manner. Sure the truly big events get news coverage, but not when one or two ships visit town.

So, how does the average person find out about your excursions and special events? Pretend you know nothing of trains, and try to find your museum's website. Also, try to find related museums in the area In this example, the ship's website I do know about doesn't have any links to other ships, or if they do, I haven't seen them. If there's a sailing schedule website someplace, I don't know where it is.

What about railroads? Railfan used to publish a special event calendar, but I think they either stopped or moved it to the web, I don't recall which.

So, how do your customers find you? Are they missing the boat?

Unfortunately, in far too many cases they may be missing the train. The situation with websites is increasingly grim.

If they find the website it may list an eight year old notice of an upcoming banquet with a guest speaker who has now been dead for several years, like one group in my area had until the site was finally and mercifully taken down completely.....

Or it may have three year old, out of date monthly meeting notices like another.....

Or the listings for all the past as well as upcoming events may be marked as "to be announced" and no details ever get posted .....

I am sorry to have to bring up the subject of fouled up websites repeatedly, but it is quite common now and is one of the most unnecessary situations in the railroad history hobby and the preservation industry. Editing a website takes as long to do with a program like Dreamweaver as it does to write the same text in Microsoft Word, and taking down an out of date page takes a couple seconds of time and effort. There is no excuse for the many groups that have fouled up and out of date websites other than unwillingness to spend the time to do the very small amount of work needed to correct the situation.

And if nobody in the group can take the time and effort to work on the website it may be time to consider hiring a website professional to have them edit it to just the contact information, or calling the service provider to have it taken down.

Failing to take corrective action not only wastes the time and effort of the public, it also wastes the time and effort of our own members and volunteers who are trying to help out at events that nobody can find out about.

PC

Hello All,
The internet is a remarkable tool to attract participants in your Heritage society or visitors to your museum but as mentioned before the site needs to be up to date. The problem as I see it is that some or most of us are not well versed in the technology to maintain a active web site much less build one that will rise to the tops of searches. RIHSPI is lucky in that we have been able to attract some younger members experienced in this field. May I suggest that it would be in any organizations’ best interest to try recruit members in this area and encourage the younger members if they show any interest in doing web development.Our site is maintained by our young members and updated in a very regular manner. Community colleges would be a place to look for people with the talent and the time to help. Many there are interested in web design and is a hobby for some they are not necessarily interested in railroading and would possibly be willing to invest some time and eventually become a rail fan to boot. Linking to Facebook can also help with getting the word out.
Cheers
Karel Brouwers
http://rihspi.mithrilcloud.com/

And, when you do finally get your web site updated, make the content such that it invites people who don't care about trains or preservation to come visit for a good time, and put it where they, not just us, will find it. Railfan magazine is fine for preaching to the choir, but the people we need to come won't look there.

dave

At Branford Electric Rwy. Ass'n. - Shore Line Trolley Museum, the Web site is one of those Reserved Occupations that only officers, and other insiders can perform, and they have lots of other demands on their time. The Webmaster does a good job, but this year he's also the Chair of the Board, and some of the information to be revised has to come from other busy officers.

Using a Content Management System to set up your web site can allow less technical people to maintain up-to-date content on your web site. You can have levels of authorized users like authors, editors, publishers, etc. Even if your doing it all yourself, it's frequently easier to put up content using the CMS framework. There can be a steep learning curve setting up the CMS web site, but the effort can really pay off. There are a lot of different CMS's, I'm most familiar with http://www.joomla.org. The more popular CMS's have hundreds or thousands of extensions that can allow you to do sophisticated things on your website.

But forget the website, how about a sign out front with the hours that your museum is open? I've seen more than one museum that is missing that sign.

I've also seen museums that are not open when they say they will be. On one memorable occasion in the summer of 1999 I saw a billboard on the highway and detoured miles to visit a tourist railroad. It was very quiet when we arrived. When we entered the depot through the open door we were greeted by a nasty voice, "Can't you see we're closed!" You don't have to be a webmaster to get the physical signs right.

-Mark

WRM just got a more visible sign by the highway as one part of a Boy Scout's Eagle Scout project.

While we're grumbling about websites, here's a reminder I post everyone once in a whle...

Along with making sure your site isn't part of the World Wide COBWEB (i.e. isn't updated), be sure it tells folks where you're located.

I run a directory of tourist railway links (railroaddata.com, add your site today, it's free!) and it's amazing how many sites don't mention location, or give directions only locals would know.

Bugtessel and Western Steam Railroad, Museum and Fly Fishing
Located in beautiful Bugtessel, just 3 miles west of Weberly!

Once again, folks it's the WORLDWIDE web. People from all over the globe wander onto your site. Exactly where is Bugtessel, and start with what CONTINENT you're on! Don't assume folks know where you are...

When giving navigational instructions, it's good to have both cross-streets and street address. Some software "prefers" numerical street addresses to cross-streets. This may not apply if you're "out in the boonies", but anything we can do to make it easier to find our locations is "a good thing". It may help to have someone who knows nothing about the museum or railway look at printed and on-line material and see how useful it is. Work with local highway and tourist bureau people to see about getting road signs installed to point the way.

And as far as the "we know where it is" syndrome, I've run into this on a railfan website, where members will post a report and assume that "everyone" knows that they're referring to Los Angeles and not Washington DC when they report something happening on "Metro". Orange Empire Railway Museum is known throughout the world, but I usually add that it's "in Perris, near Riverside, in Southern California" for the benefit of folks who haven't heard of us.

And have a couple of your members check the address with their GPS units to make sure that it actually leads to the right place. I have seen some instances of errors with address information and GPS solutions that resulted in the destination for a museum being a WalMart down the street.

PC

Location information: Provide a map!

Internet navigation systems are dumb -- they do not know the shortest route from the main highway is a dirt road. Or that in the highway improvement project an intersection was closed for safety reasons (the side road now ends in a cul-de-sac a guardrail away from the highway [computer program did not know of the closure and was giving instructions to turn]. I've worked the front gate at many DOWT events at Orange Empire and have heard about both situations from arriving visitors

Also the road out front does not run north-south, but parallel to the railroad grade, so just following GPS coordinates will not necessarily bring someone to the front gate. I've seen visitors start up the staff entrance road on the wrong side of the r/w.

For years, computerized mapping systems had WRM's street address showing that we were about 8 miles WEST of Suisun City CA rather than EAST! This resulted in bad situations like a volunteer who had to wait until 11 PM for emergency road service since the truck driver could not find a railroad museum west of Suisun.

I finally found that the best approach was to contact the two firms (Navteq and TeleAtlas) who supply the basic data for GPS navigation systems. TeleAtlas was particularly good - the presentative looked up my description of our actual location on satellite imagery and promptly fixed the problem (although it took a few months to get the updated data out to end users).

Regarding routing people over dirt roads, TeleAtlas data does have a field to designate a road as being dirt -- sometimes they don't know that a road is dirt, and will make the correction when told.

Although having current and informative webpages for Museum X are certainly a good thing, they answer the question "What is Museum X doing this weekend". I think the original post was also aimed at trying to be able to answer the public's question of "Is there anything train-related going on near me this weekend?".

The public may not know about you to consult your website. Friends/family who are "general public" in interest have asked me about where they can ride a train, because they consider me a knowledgeable source. And they rarely have ever heard of anything I tell them.

How do we make it easy for these people to find us? Better search tags on websites? Links to similar nearby attractions? Establishing/maintaining a comprehensive list at "trainsnearme.com" with all the labor that entails? Seeking inclusion on sites that provide info on upcoming events in their local region? Are there such sites? I never thought to look.

One local library hosting a speakers program promoted it through notices in the local newspapers and flyers distributed to area restaurants, hobby shops, and other libraries. With this very limited promotional operation they managed to get some very good turnouts for their events. A low-tech way of doing things, but sometimes a pretty effective way.

PC

> I think the original post was also aimed at trying to
> be able to answer the public's question of "Is there
> anything train-related going on near me this weekend?".

Exactly! While the website discussion is good, people can't visit your website if they don't know who you are.

Back to the Tall Ships example. What's the website of that ship? Which ship? I don't know, it was brown, with tall masts, and a couple fluffy white sails. Sounds silly, doesn't it, but non-train folks would probably describe your train in about the same manner. "It looked old, and it had a black engine pulling some green cars. I think it was a steam engine..." (which may or may not actually be the case.)

Given that (total lack of) info, how do they find you? In the ships case, I expected to at least see some kind of sign at the dock saying that such-and-such a ship was in town, open for tours during these hours, going for sails on these dates, visit tallmastsandfluffysails.com for tickets and more info. :)

How to get the word out to the general public is a continuing problem. There are a variety of approaches, a few of which actually work.