Website Cleanup II

sctab

As I mentioned last month, the website had become rather disorganized as a result of gradual growth over the last year. I’ve reorganized the material about the layout this time, creating a couple of new sections, and linking them all under the master “The Railroad” page. I’ve also put the prototype scenery section underneath “Prototype” (the new name for the general section for prototype info, formerly known as “Background”), which is why it no longer appears in the list of section headings across the top of every page. I also promoted the information about model trains in general to the masthead. A subset of what I think are the more interesting pages are linked from the Home page directly, in addition to appearing on various section pages.

As a part of this, I’ve made the information under “The Railroad” more structured, with each page gaining a third heading line (see image above) showing its name and the list of sections above it (in this example, the page about the expressway is part of the “Model Scenery” section, which is under the main Railroad section. I’ll probably eventually extend this concept to the rest of the website’s sections (except for Musings and the Photo Albums, as those are handled a bit differently by iWeb and have some pages auto-generated from templates I don’t want to modify.

And, finally, I’ve added an experimental “Search This Site” dialog to the Home page. This uses Google’s custom search capability, following a tip on this website. This depends on Google having indexed my site; I don’t have a site map so there’s no guarantee they did a complete job, but Google seems to be pretty efficient at doing that on all on their own (I keep finding my own pages when doing Google searches for Japanese train info, which is, quite frankly, a very weird feeling).

I may make additional changes later in the week, and if so I’ll update this page when I do rather than posting a new Musing.

Other website changes:
- Updated the Reservations and Recent Arrivals pages, which hadn’t caught up with December yet.