It’s been roughly six months since I put ClassicRotaryPhones.com online, and I thought this could be a good time to pause and reflect. I’m still struck by the novelty of it, and can’t get over the fact that I created a website on a subject of which I had no knowledge. Yes, for those just tuning in, I was completely ignorant regarding the field of vintage telephony. I suppose my saving graces were my previous experience with website construction and an overwhelming enthusiasm for my new-found interest. I’ve learned a lot in the past months, often with the help of other enthusiastic, but far more experienced, individuals that I’ve met along the way. I’ve been happy to respond to all sorts of questions regarding telephone history or repair, though I’ll freely admit that I’ve sometimes had to fall back on the wisdom of others. (Dennis!) I’ll always help if I can.
What I’d like to determine is whether the content I’ve been posting has been of interest to readers, and what changes might be needed to make this site a more interesting, or useful, place to visit. So, my friend, pull up a chair and I’ll tell you what I feel has been accomplished so far, and what direction I foresee the site taking in the future.
My real challenge up to this point has been to create content of interest to others. I’m new, so anything old-phone related is interesting to me, but grizzled veterans are liable to seek things a little more substantial than I can deliver at this point. So I’ve had to work with what I have. I’m not new at website design, having two award-winning sites under my belt, tvlamps.net and texansinc.com. The skills I learned while building and maintaining those sites has made that aspect of the project easier. I’ve also been getting a little more fluent with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, so I’ve had fun making more extensive use of graphics. But ClassicRotaryPhones.com differs from my other two sites in one important way. Whereas my other sites consist of “traditional” pages of hand-coded html, this one is based around WordPress, the popular blog software. My reasoning for going with WordPress was simple: I wanted ClassicRotaryPhones.com to have a more casual atmosphere, where posts could be more spontaneous. I’ve also found myself adding traditional pages to the mix, making the site something of a hybrid. The main page, its categories and posts, are all WordPress, but the pages listed under “Also on ClassicRotaryPhones.com” are actually stand-alone html pages, cunningly disguised to blend visually with the look of WordPress. My purpose for all this was to allow for the sort of layout found on the Vintage Phone Advertisements pages. I’m not completely happy with this blend of formats, but will stick with it for now. It’s possible that I may, at some point, make the home page something other than WordPress, the blog being accessed from a menu. I don’t see that happening anytime soon, and would be dependent on the non-blog pages growing a lot.
But I was going to talk about content, wasn’t I? Let’s consider the blog posts, which are the majority of the sites content. My ideas come from all over the place, and are often inspired by a problem I’m working or a bit of history I’m curious about. But many of the posts emphasize images rather than text, and consist of vintage photographs or documents. So the majority of the posts are either articles on a telephone history, “how-to” articles on telephone repair/restoration, or reproductions of old photos or documents. I would like to keep the scope of content as broad as possible, but my available time often dictates the nature of the posts. To keep content fresh, I post on an almost daily basis, but that sometimes results in posts that require minimal effort… like posting the vintage photographs. Hopefully they are enjoyed by others, as I find that aspect of historical research particularly interesting. To make them suitable for historical reference, I typically post the photos in two or more sizes, with a particularly large version usually made available.
If the various statistics on the site are any indication, the most popular posts are about repairing phones that don’t ring, receive, transmit or dial as they should, and I hope to do more of that sort of article. Each case is unique, and it’s hard to explain all the possible problems that could exist with a malfunctioning phone, which gives me another idea: what about a message forum? From my perspective, forums have their pluses and minuses, and I’ll put a lot of thought into the idea before taking the plunge. What makes forums interesting is that visitors to the site can leave messages (comments, questions or answers) and communicate with countless other visitors. This can often result in a community of like-minded folk, and a place to learn or share knowledge. The downside is twofold: building interest and keeping out undesirables. My experience has been that a site must have a significant number of visitors before a forum can “take off”, and we’re just not there yet. One of my other sites averages around 1000 visitors per day, and the forum activity (the posting of messages) is mediocre at best. ClassicRotaryPhones.com sees more visitors every week, but it currently only up to around 150 daily. Actually, I believe that antique/vintage telephones is a particularly suitable topic for a forum, and would probably do better with 500 visitors per day than my other does at 1000. Something to ponder. The other issue is keeping trouble-makers out. The various forum software packages all make some effort to restrict access and/or filter content, but things can still happen. I had a kid log on to my forum, while I was out of town, no less, and upload a bunch of pornography…and that’s not something I want to have to clean up again. I won’t go the forum route unless I’m confident that it’s as iron-clad as possible. Any thoughts regarding the forum idea would be welcomed.
Besides the blog, I’ve also made pages of vintage telephone ads, eBay searches and wiring diagrams, and make additions to those periodically. I’m particularly proud of the advertisements, as I think that archiving the high-resolution scans is a worthwhile project. I’m just about done, but would like to stress that any input you give regarding the future of this site will be appreciated!
- Mark