ModelersGuild, a major website redesign

It had to happen, I dig into a major project and immediately get inspired to write about it. I usually would write these on my blog, alas we are a bit off topic for that. This Hub is about my musings on what is the Modelers Guild and how I intend to revive its niche and purpose in that niche.

ModelersGuild started as a lowly ol' Blogspot blog that outlived its features, so I thought. Many people were commenting on my writings and I was finally feeling like someone somewhere read my work. I imagined them to be just like me, reading all they could to be able to pick up on a secret or two here and there. Looks like I was right, however I still was jumping the gun. I paid for the domain name Scratchbuildersguild.com. I couldn't afford to build many model kits, I was determined to build my models from scratch.

That worked all the way to my very first week of building the new Guild website.

I picked up a Narrow Gauge & Shortline Gazette one day at the local model railroad club and saw an advertisement for a Craftsman Kit by the name of the Barrel Factory by Full Steam Ahead. I could believe how nice the model looked and wanted to build it. On the way home I was thinking of what I could say to get one. When I arrived home the email was ripe and ready in my mind. I asked the proprietor if he'd be interested in my website reviewing his kit. I couldn't believe it, it worked I set out to build the kit as best I could. I not only wrote about it on my site, but also some community sites like the Railroad-Line. This led to more opportunities to review kits.

But that's not scratch building now is it. I had to rename the site, I hd to get it done because this was clearly becoming a "kit" site.

I decided it was time to build a network. I added a forum and social networking features which worked great at first. People were coming to the site and Google was sending 100 people a day to the site. With each new traffic milestone came more and more unreliability with the website I had built alone. I needed to rebuild and start with an all new website with all the old articles and users intact.

The new focus with a new feature

I began learning and collaborating with a like minded Graphic Designer Shawn Branstetter about building a new ModelersGuild that really matched my focus while being faster and more reliable.

The new focus is all about crosstown traffic . I, like many other website owners, like to horde users and promote activity for the sake of activity at MY site, see the problem ? I was Ok with that kind of thinking until recently. I started reading up about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the techniques that push your worth in search engines.

So what does that have to do with my focus ?

A great article on one site is found by Google to have good grammar with few spelling mistakes, some photos and some good meta tags. This is great but what gives the article credibility ? Does it have anybody linking to it ? This linking is what I want to bring into the ModelersGuild, not just to us, right back at the users of the site. In short building a quality presence in search engine bringing your blogs and websites a bigger piece of the search engine pie.

I have heard it myself and I know why. If you allow these comments to continue you'll also find out that your sick of logging into or registering new accounts on websites. I agree and don't like it either, why don't we change how we look at it.

My biggest gripe with websites is, I'll spend three months working on a project only to find my forum post to sink from lack of discussion in the thread, while off-topic filler topics thrive. I think it is time that we all get our own blogs and share our new posts to a site that collects posts from the Modeler community.

Why would you want to use the ModelersGuild to provide your posts to our community. I'll speak about site features later but technically we currently have a Google PageRank of 5. This means a site with a 5 out of 10 score of credibility will boost your blogs rankings with Google. Why don't we use the site we have now ? Its called spam at most sites and heavily moderated, not a good idea if you want to keep your account. 

By using community blog posts as a site feature we provide a system that promotes the best to compete organically. One final reason to Blog, you can get paid by Googles Adsense.