Site History

Thanks to the Web Archive web site, we were able to puzzle together a collection of representative screen captures showing the design changes of the NASG web site's home page over the decades. This page also covers other changes made to the site and who was/is managing it.

1997

Craig O'Connell started maintaining a collection of files on his personal web site that provided information about the NASG. We have been unable to find screen captures from the page back then.

1999

Michael Greene registers the "nasg.org" domain name.

2000

Michael Greene takes over the NASG webmaster position from Craig O'Connell.

2001

This was Michael Greene first official home page of the new nasg.org web site. The home page offered some news items and a button menu on the left to take you to the various pages contained within the site.

2002

The design was evolved by removing the frame borders within the page. The page's content was tightened up a bit, and the "design standard" back then was to duplicate all of the page links at the bottom of the home page (this was intended for people who had their web browsers turn off loading of images, as slow dial-up connections and download-rate charges were still a thing back then).

2004

The design was enhanced by giving the background a more pleasing color and adding support for member-only information, and the initial start to the listing of available products and available companies carrying S-scale products (red buttons in upper right).

2007

The main change this year was the addition of using an external service to offer the visitor the ability to do text searches on the web site.

2010

Michael Greene initiates a complete redesign of the web site.

2011

Michael Greene resigns as the NASG's webmaster and Jim Bresnahan steps up to take over.

2012

Late in 2011, Peter Vanvliet was contacted by then NASG vice-president Bill Winans and then NASG treasurer Jim Kindraka to consider the idea of taking over the NASG's web site. While Jim Bresnahan had stepped up last year, he and his wife had retired and were touring the country and so found that they just didn't have the time to devote to the web site. Peter accepted the challenge, and took over as the NASG's webmaster in December of 2011. The first priority was to get the time-critical content updated, but then in 2012 an initial redesign of the web site was unveiled. The concept was to reduce the overwhelming immediate display of lots of text and lots of choices the visitor faced when arriving at the site. The new design offered a simple menu of common choices. The center of the page had a set of rotating model photos showing off S, which, unfortunately, the Web Archive web site did not capture, hence the blank space in the screen capture below (ed: I'll see if I can find a back-up copy of the web site on my disk drives to see if I can recreate the image)

2013

As the visitor count kept ticking up, we received and reviewed requests for additional buttons on the home page, to expand the menu. This did break the original intent behind the design, but compromises have to be made sometimes. So, in 2013 more buttons appeared.

2015

As more and more people started buying things via the Web, it became obvious that the NASG web site needed to be enhanced to offer an online shopping cart for new membership applications and membership renewals. Once that was implemented in March of 2015, the NASG Company Store was also upgraded to be able to have members and non-members add hard-good items to their shopping cart. The shopping cart has always been custom-code and is built into the web site itself, i.e. it does not use a third-party system. Online payments were handled via PayPal as they offered the most choices for methods of payment, and they are extremely secure.

2017

The addition of the shopping cart led to the fact that the whole web site needed to be changed from pure HTML-only files to PHP-based code, so that dynamic interaction with the shopping cart and the NASG's membership records could be safely and securely implemented. So that, for example, you could add an item to the shopping, go to another page that isn't part of the shopping cart, but then later return back to the shopping cart and still find your item in the cart. This, and an accumulated list of many other changes, necessitated a complete re-write of the entire web site, which took about 6 months. The home page was also "upgraded" to now show a set of rotating images on the full page of the home page (this was possible because more and more people were getting higher-speed Internet connections, so larger files could be downloaded quickly). Also, the home page photo rotation was changed on a weekly basis (the oldest one removed and a new one added). As you can see, an attempt was made to go back to a simple menu system. The buttons were pushed to the outside so as to maximize the visibility of the photos.

2019

Funded by the NASG, Inc., Peter Vanvliet (webmaster) takes over ownership of the "nasg.org" and "nasgconvention.com" web site domains from Michael Greene (domain registration requires that one individual is responsible for the ownership and makes the payments).

2020

By now, people using cellphones to visit web sites was becoming common place, and the NASG web site, as shown above, did not look good on the small-screen devices. It worked well on PCs and laptops, as well as some large tablets, but on regular cellphones it left much to be desired. To get the site to conform to the latest web design standards, which includes full support for cellphones, the entire web site had to, once again, be completely re-coded. This, again, took about 6 months. At the time we were already approaching 50,000 pages, so you can see why this was not a trivial project, plus trying to keep the "old/current" site updated with the latest news. The project was completed in September 2020. The design changes were implemented in such a manner that there should be no need for another re-write of the site in the future. The new design also removed all of the menu options from the home page, to just feature 9 great photos of S modeling or S events. Clicking (with the computer mouse) or tapping the screen (of a cellphone or touch-screen computer) dismisses the photo rotation and takes the visitor to the "Welcome" page, where the new menu structure is displayed. This is how the site is still today.

2022

Peter Vanvliet bought "sscale.org" from the webmaster of the NMRA's S Scale SIG, as that group was shutting down and wanting to remove their web site. With approval from the S Scale SIG's leadership team, all of the unique content that they had was moved over to the NASG web site. Peter then re-directed "sscale.org" to that dedicated section on this web site. The content duplication was completed in July 2023.

The Future

Peter Vanvliet is working on upgrading the "Product Gallery" section of the NASG web site. The software application that he was using had some limitations and made editing of entries somewhat time-consuming. A new software application is now being used and the data are being migrated over.

The data migration step takes just a few minutes, but at the same time Peter is thoroughly reviewing every single entry to make sure that the information is accurate (using various sources), removing errors, and adding missing items.

The overall objective is that, when this re-organization is complete, we will finally have a definitive list of every item ever produced in S (at least for the product categories that are listed). This has been, and continues to be, a massive undertaking as we have over 19,000 items. However, once completed, this monumental task will be forever done, and we can just focus on adding new items as they come to market. At the rate this process is going and judging by the amount of work still to be done, we are realistically looking at a completion date of some time in late 2027.