Featured Website
Our featured design is the Grasselli Tower website for the Hoosier Valley Railroad Museum in North Judson, Indiana. I was personally involved in the move of this amazing piece of railroad history and I donated my time to design the website and provided the web hosting for the site. Just so you know, I do occasionally design websites free of charge for worthy non-profit groups and charities.
Website Concept
The concept for this website project was to establish a tool for raising funds, explaining the history of the tower, and helping people better understand how and why interlocking towers existed. They wanted a fairly simple design with static webpages and a graphical representation of a railroad signal for a donation meter.
Website Development
The Grasselli Tower website was developed over a relatively short period of time. All of the content for the website was generated through research I personally did along with help from several volunteers at the museum. I also made several trips up to East Chicago and North Judson, Indiana to take some of the photographs for the website.
The custom website design itself included developing a logo which integrated one of the armstrong levers in the tower. In the railroad community, this is a very identifiable aspect of an interlocking tower. It also required me to spruce up the Hoosier Valley Railroad Museum's diamond logo.
The graphical navigation links in the left column are not a feature I typically like to include in navigation, but it works well for the Grasselli Tower website. The roll-over graphics add a simple touch of motion to draw in the eyes. Since it was determined that many of the visitors to this website were of a "slightly advanced age" the graphics and text are larger than normal to accommodate their viewing needs.
The donation meter was crafted from a photograph of an actual semaphore signal located at the museum. The colors and blade positions of the semaphore are changed manually in the graphic as necessary. We had thought about incorporating a standard "thermometer style" fundraising graph, but the semaphore was determined to be more appropriate for the Grasselli Tower website.
The website was developed as an SEO-ready website complete with all tags, descriptions and keywords with SEO in mind from the very beginning. After the site was finished, extensive keyword research was completed as well as rewriting of several pieces of content.
The color combinations are reminiscent of colors that were used by railroads that once ran through North Judson. The black and yellow scheme in the header closely resembles the Erie Railroad's colors and the maroon in the left column represents the Pennsylvania Railroad. The gray in footer is representative of the New York Central. All of the text links on the website were left in the standard blue, which represents the Chesapeake & Ohio. While the colors are not meant to be exact matches, they were designed in place for a reason.
Results & Success
This website has achieved a number of results since it was first launched. Fundraising for a project such as this is difficult and best, but funds have been generated from this website with minimal marketing expended.
This website enjoys a steady PageRank 4 for the homepage and continues to maintain visitor traffic levels. The unique content of this site continues to allow it to rank very high in Google searches and the website has is considered an authority on a number of subject matters.
My Personal Thoughts
I really enjoyed building the Grasselli Tower website. It's not a huge website, but it is a good representation of a starter website that a non-profit group could use to help build their organization.
As a fundraising tool, a website such as this one is crucial to the success of a project since funding sources are solicited from people who may never get to see the actual railroad tower itself. I have revised this website on several occasions and continue to maintain the site for the museum free of charge.
If you would like me to design a website for your railroad museum or just need a site designed for your business, I would be more than happy to assist you. Give me a call at 1-800-946-3079 or fill out the FREE quote request form for more information.