A model railroad convention — Baton Rouge, LA, June 2025
My dad hosted The Blues Express 2025, a model railroad convention, and asked me to serve as treasurer. My response: “Ok, but we have to build a website.”
He wasn’t convinced. Most of the railroading community skews toward senior men, and he figured registering online wasn’t something they’d go for. I assured him they would — mostly because I had no intention of offering any other way to register.
Why that mattered
With a convention that size, paper registrations, checks that may or may not have cleared, and tracking every attendee’s details by hand would have buried both of us. I needed something simple enough that anyone — regardless of age or comfort with computers — could sign up, add family members, choose add-ons, and pay, all in one pass.
The build
I built a JotForm signup covering every registration option: attendee details, add-ons, and family member registration, with payment collected right at signup. The form itself was designed to be dead simple — no accounts to create, no confusing steps, just fill it out and you’re registered.
Built-in urgency
Right on the site, I added a live countdown clock — first counting down the days left to lock in the early bird registration price, then automatically switching over to count down to the convention itself once that deadline passed. It gave people a clear, visible reason to register sooner rather than put it off, and it kept the convention date front of mind for anyone who’d already signed up.
Where it actually paid off
The real win was on the backend. I connected the JotForm to a Google Sheet, so every registration landed automatically in a spreadsheet with full details — who registered, party size, add-ons chosen, all of it. From there:
- Sorting attendees any way we needed took seconds
- We exported names straight into bulk badge and pass printing
- When someone asked “how many do we have registered?” — an answer that used to mean digging through paperwork — we had it in seconds
The result
It was the first convention either my dad or I had ever organized, and the bookkeeping side of it was genuinely easy, entirely thanks to the JotForm-to-spreadsheet pipeline doing the tracking for us.
A note on this one
This was a single-use site, built for one event and taken down afterward, so there’s no live link to visit. I did record a screen walkthrough before retiring it — once that’s posted, it’ll go here as an embedded video or a link out.
