Truth is, I need my own web site like I need another hole in my head, but a few months ago I decided that I just had to have a place to vent and to exercise my creativity by saying whatever I wanted about cars (mostly Porsches), racing, travel, cruise ships and of course, model trains. So I signed up with Go Daddy–to register my domain name and for hosting–and got to work.

Then began the trying process of learning how the game is played. I chose a template or theme from an extensive menu, picking one whose colors I liked (how stupid is that?). Unfortunately, the template was for a restaurant, and it listed things such as favorite dishes, hours of operation and stuff like that, none of which applied to my situation. But I managed to cheat that.

Then came layout. The original template had about three or four topics boxes, each allowing for one column of copy beneath it. Well heck, I’m a magazine guy, so I quickly learned I could make columns as wide as I want and spread them across as much of the page as I chose, which I did. When I got through, I had what I considered, a pretty nifty looking spread. Unfortunately, I soon learned that what looked good–and fit!-- on my large-screen monitor wouldn’t fit on smaller screens, or on tablets or on cell phones, which, according to my IT neighbor, is where all the action is these days. So I brooded for a couple of weeks, not wanting to destroy my precious creation, before I resized and re-layed out the whole darn thing, which still needs tweaking. Plus you have to keep feeding the beast, as the number of clicks declines once viewers have seen all there is to see. Anyway, if you want to take a look, my handiwork is at joerusz.com.

Is that OK, Bob, tooting my own horn? Sorry about the pun.

Joe,

I liked you until I found out your were a Porsche guy. . . naw just kidding. Nice website

Nowadays, I don’t recommend anything but a responsive site. In web site parlance, that is one that can adjust the layout according to the resolution of the device viewing it.

If you look at my site using a wide monitor, (in 1920 x 1080) and then narrow the windows, you will see items move, scale down, and even the menu system change.

That’s the way to go now, but not all the free/cheap sites offer this.

Greg

Greg, I’m aware of the responsive site thing Starbucks has one), but that’s as far as my knowledge of the process goes. BTW, Go Daddy is not free, but on the other hand, I’m not going broke paying them. Their “tech” people have been helpful. but don’t fully grasp what I want my site to be or look like. In fact, while I was on the phone with one of them, he tried to resize my site, but gave up because he didn’t know where to put the pieces (text, captions, photos) after he moved them around. I did so myself in maybe, an hour or so, just sliding things around. I’m still not happy and the good news is that I have a new topic–the LA Auto Show, with lots of photos and info–coming next week. For what it’s worth, my neighbor works in IT somewhere in Century City, while his wife stays at home and designs web sites all day.

Well, I’m not going broke either… in fact I’m very lucky, I think they are giving me a tremendous discount, only $100 a year for email and the web site with 650 pages… way too cheap but I am not complaining.

Have been a customer for 10 years, and they asked for my endorsement on their site, so maybe it’s not all “luck”. Anyway I am using Joomla, and there’s hundreds of free “templates” and you can rearrange stuff very easily, but Joomla is powerful enough to be used for commercial sites, and also lots of plugins.

The other benefit is that Joomla is supported by many ISPs so if you move your site, you don’t have to recreate if from scratch.

Greg

my site is based on a simple template from half a decade or more ago.

the changes were made by trial and error, the content is entered using html.

that is a boring and time consuming process.

so lately i am playing with the thought, to use a forum software, shut down the ability to write for anybody, but me - and write my texts just as easily, as in any forum.

i know, that would be no solution for a commercial site, but for a private hobby site?

There’s a ton of web creation tools that are WYSIWYG all customizable from a browser.

I’m surprised your ISP does not offer something.

Have you asked them?

Greg

they do - for a stiff price.

and i’m so cheap…

I don’t know if you noticed, mine is under $10 a month, far from stiff…

I think you need to investigate a bit more if you REALLY want to have something better, it’s out there.

Greg

Guys, I appreciate the comments and the advice. I think the problem is partly that I envision my site as an electronic magazine (Zine?) with topics and stories being added all the time. It’s not a how to, or a “Hey, look at my stuff,” although in time there will be some of my “stuff” like travel photos and my model buildings, on the site. Mostly, I want to report on things like Porsche’s Rennsport Reunion, which is currently my one and only big story, and (coming tomorrow), the LA Auto Show with photos of all the newest, sporty-looking cars (no trucks or minivans). Right there, the templates I’ve looked at don’t work without massaging because they seem to be designed for businesses and like that. Plus they use only a few photos while my Rennsport story had, in addition to a few random shots, a slide show with maybe 50 or more photos.

What I really, really would like is that there self-adjusting size program, which we discussed. Then I could lay out the page on my big screen and let the software do the rest. Scrunching down my pages to fit the 70th percentile is like painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel on a Post-It.

Sounds like you should simply move to Wordpress or (if more technically able) Drupal. These include automatic “responsive” layouts that make it look good on a mobile device.

I kind of agree with Michael. You are wanting a professional custom website from a cookie cutter template site builder. I understand you don’t have an interest in learning complicated html editing software, so to stay with the site builder options have you looked at any of the Blog sites? Sounds to me that a blog format would be about as close as it gets to what you are looking for without programming.

Check out the site Kevin Strong built on Blogspot: http://tuscarorarailroad.blogspot.com/

For what it’s worth, the techie at Go Daddy said that they will offer responsive in January or so. Meanwhile, I squeezed everything into a middle-of-the-page format, although I hated to mess up my beautiful photo layout. I did my newest entry in the smaller format. Check out my LA Auto Show spread and captions, which I kinda like.

Last word: Ya can’t really tell anyone what a site should look like because it’s all subjective. I’ve been to prolly all the sites of the guys that we know (Kevin, Ray, Greg, to name a few) and they are all great in their own way. But I worked at a magazine for almost 40 years which is why I try to make my site look like a magazine page, spread or layout. But that’s me. Your actual mileage may vary. (http://www.largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-smile.gif)

As for blog, I Googled my ass off (I’m down 20 pounds) hoping to learn the difference between a blog and a website. Darned if I know. And please don’t tell me that “blog” is short for “weblog” because that explains nothing. FYI, I visit Strobist the photography site/blog frequently and know what it looks like. To me it seems to be in the presentation, i.e. the appearance. I see 'em all as words and photos on a page.

BTW, Jon, I don’t want a “professional custom website,” just one that’s easy to use and looks/works the way I want it to. If I wanted a professional site, I’d go to my neighbor, who designs them. I’ll send you her bill.

Joe,

I share your pain. I’ve been doing relatively simple websites for years, and I decided my latest one would work on a mobile device as well as a big screen. My pal here in Florida develops massive flight simulator programs, so he told me how to do it and pointed me to several “templates” that, instead of using ‘magic numbers’ [that’s what we used to call a number plopped into the code for no apparent reason like width=640,] the templates use relative numbers, like width=75%.

There are two insoluble problems. (1) some content doesn’t lend itself to a mobile device - in particular, magazine style layouts (so you’re screwed, buddy) and (2) the templates require you to more-or-less build web pages from scratch and not use a WYSIWYG website developer program. And none of the templates that I have seen will take a multi-column page that looks good on a large screen and re-format it to two columns for a smaller screen or one column for a smartphone.

(If you are only targeting tablets, not smartphones, then you hardly need a mobile format?) The general solution to your problem, I believe, is a “Content Management System” - a web server application that takes your data (text, photos) and feeds it to a user device in whatever format is necessary to fit the device. As wikipedia says: “CMSs are often used to run websites containing blogs, news, and shopping.” You can imagine how useful it would be for shopping - the same is true for a magazine. I found this article quite valuable: http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/definition/content-management-system

In reading those and similar pages, I saw notes that Drupal and Joomla are both CMS type applications. (Unfortunately I have to go out for a boating lunch, so I can’t do any more research right now!)

I’ve used Godaddy’s Website builder several times, and while it is good for beginners, it has too many restrictions for me. I haven’t got into Wordpress, but I hear you can do awesome things with it. I do use a program on my computer which ‘publishes’ the pages locally or remotely when I am comfortable with them. Currently I am on NetObjects Fusion (NOF) vers 12.0. The reason for using NOF is that it has a simple photo gallery page generator - just tell it which photos and it will make up a thumbnail page/area and all the corresponding pages. I was supporting Realtors, so you can imagine how useful that was - a new home to sell each month . . .

I partially solved the mobile problem by using ignoring content that doesn’t lend itself to mobiles (e.g. multi-page PDFs) and inserting “iframes” in the pages for data that would work on either. It means I have 3 pages - a data page with the iframe content, and two distinct pages with different layouts for different devices. But I only have to update the data page, not the other two, and the data never gets out of sync.

Oh, yes. Blogs are indeed websites. But just as a log is updated and gets longer every time you write an entry, so does a Web-log. the difference is that a Blog grows from the top up, unlike a paper log that grows from the bottom down. Web -ogs (Blogs) are just a useful type of website, and I don’t see them as useful for a magazine format.

I went to a Can-am race at laguna seca in 72 or 73… I standing right next to the guardrail at the corkescrew when jackie oliver smashed his can am car into the rail… luckily the fiberglass shards went over my head, by at least 12 inches.

Fond memories of balls to the walls racing.

Greg

Greg, I was there–both years. Porsche won in the 917-10 the first year and the 917-30 the following year. They also pissed off the SCCA, which changed the rules, effectively legislating out the '30, which ran two races and pulled out in '74. Brian Redman drove and maybe won (I forget) at Mid-Ohio. The 917-30, painted in blue and yellow Sunoco livery, shows up at most vintage racing events. There are three Penske (read Mark Donohue driven) chassis and maybe some copy cats (I don’t keep score) They are awesome cars, which made perhaps 1,200 horsepower back then. It ain’t that much today, when you have road cars making that much.

Pete, that is very informative, but I will have to print it out and read it for content, which I can’t do on screen. I’m a paper guy.

Which brings up a point: in my last post when I railed against all that web stuff (don’t let your kids drive drunk), I should have better explained my vision of a site, which to me should look like a magazine page or a spread. Flashy, topical, with ever-changing news and stories, like a monthly magazine. Archiving, which Greg, Ray, Kevin and many more do, isn’t that important since I’m not teaching anyone anything. OK, maybe if there’s something that happened that’s worth recalling in the distant future, then I get it. But mostly, I just want to move along. BTW, I fiddled with joerusz.com, put in the latest LA Auto Show and news about the latest Porsche 911 Turbo (fast and just as expensive) and redid the Home page and other stuff. I’m working on downloading chapters from my well-received Porsche annuals, which sold more than 5,000 copies a year, to my site as soon as I take them to the local office store which can scan a 10 x 10-inch page. So, please revisit my site and tell me what cha think. It’s a constant work in progress.

Greg, you wrote about my ISP providing something. My ISP is Verizon, which basically provides the connection from house to wherever the heck the signal comes from. Did you mean domain provider, in which case it is Go Daddy. And yes they provide (for extra cost) to be your hosting service using either their platform or Word Press or another whose name I forget.

BTW, we are still on DSL (we’re getting FIOS next year) and after checking our speed, I found we’re getting 0.30 Mbps, which is less than we’ve been promised even on their lowest plan which is 0.5 to 1.5 Mbps. Trouble elsewhere? There’s nothing else on line and no programs running, as they always ask. We don’t do gaming or even streaming video–fff-for obbb bvvvious reass…sons.

Joe Rusz said:

. . .

. . . . But mostly, I just want to move along. BTW, I fiddled with joerusz.com, put in the latest LA Auto Show and news about the latest Porsche 911 Turbo (fast and just as expensive) and redid the Home page and other stuff. I’m working on downloading chapters from my well-received Porsche annuals, which sold more than 5,000 copies a year, to my site as soon as I take them to the local office store which can scan a 10 x 10-inch page. So, please revisit my site and tell me what cha think. It’s a constant work in progress.

What I think is that Website Builder will never let you do what you want. It’s a pretty simplified page tool. This is the site I am managing for a friend: Maryland Theatre for the Performing Arts using the same tool.

I also noted your pages are very, very long compared with the content. You can reset the size (length) easily to get rid of the extra blank space.

Pete, Once again, great advice, so thanks. I had heard the “pages too long” song before. But I don’t know what long means relative to short, as to me they look like they look, which is how they did when I made 'em. So how do I shorten them? BTW, maybe I’m too close to my creation (Ya think?), but I love how my site looks when you open it, especially when it opens on the home page with my smiley puss and the red Turbo photo. I was at the mailbox store inquiring about scanning some of my Porsche Sport annual stories onto a thumb drive so I could reprint them on my site (a normal home scanner won’t cut it because the pages are 10 x 10 inches), and when the guy opened my site, “Bam,” up she comes and just looks so cool. To me, at least.

BTW, take 2: my wife was on the Crystal Cruises site checking out a future cruise, and that is one great looking thing. Looks to be self-adjusting too, as it fills the screen. Her complaint is it takes forever to load (we are on crappy dsl at 0.74 Mbps), but I suspect that’s because it is so heavily content laden. And yes, we do love cruising on Crystal. They are tops.

Joe Rusz said:

Pete, Once again, great advice, so thanks. I had heard the “pages too long” song before. But I don’t know what long means relative to short, as to me they look like they look, which is how they did when I made 'em. So how do I shorten them? BTW, maybe I’m too close to my creation (Ya think?), but I love how my site looks when you open it, especially when it opens on the home page with my smiley puss and the red Turbo photo. I was at the mailbox store inquiring about scanning some of my Porsche Sport annual stories onto a thumb drive so I could reprint them on my site (a normal home scanner won’t cut it because the pages are 10 x 10 inches), and when the guy opened my site, “Bam,” up she comes and just looks so cool. To me, at least.

BTW, take 2: my wife was on the Crystal Cruises site checking out a future cruise, and that is one great looking thing. Looks to be self-adjusting too, as it fills the screen. Her complaint is it takes forever to load (we are on crappy dsl at 0.74 Mbps), but I suspect that’s because it is so heavily content laden. And yes, we do love cruising on Crystal. They are tops.

Joe,

I was messing with MTPA and I confirmed that the “page settings” [right click on a page in the blank space and click the gear wheel for page settings.] You can amke the length 100, and it will adjust to the length of your content, I think. It always grows to fit, but never shrinks!!

I often make ‘scans’ of big pages by putting them on the floor and taking a photo. Scanners tend to produce the dots of the old printing press, whereas a photo won’t - it blurs them so you don’t see them.