Site History

his site, the International List of Scale Model Related Web Sites (or ScaleModel.NET in short), was established on 3/6/1996. The goal of this site is to keep and maintain an international based list of all the web sites which are truly related to Scale Models. To minimize the maintenance efforts while keeping the list complete and grow, the concept of Sharesite is introduced. Which means that the contents of this site are intended to be freely shared with modelers from around the world. Anyone who has or know any web site that has anything to do with scale models are welcome to Add their site to the list, on-line and free. In return, the registrant receives an image file of a golden badge as shown at right, which can be displayed in their site to indicate it is a valuable member of the list, and link back to here. This concept is quite successful, as the list now contains over 7800 sites, and many of them have posted the badge in their homepage or link pages. As a result, this site currently receives more than 15000 page views per day from around the world.

The sites included in the list are categorized according to their contents or major interest, the list now contains 43 categories covering almost every aspects of scale, R/C, and railroad models. However, as the list grow, it is found that there are many sites can fall into several categories, and some special interest groups (SIG) are difficult to be categorized appropriately. To avoid misleading and to let the visitors quickly find what they are really looking for, a comprehensive search program for the database of the list is developed and launched in 1997. This program allows users to search keywords or phrase in any combination of the fields of the database. In addition, it allows recursive keyword search to narrow down the search result. A "key resource" feature and a "popularity" property were added to the program later in 1998 to let the user to locate the most useful and/or popular sites quickly.

Among the many places of this site, the Model Gallery featured scale models of many classical things such as the HMS Victory, Stephenson's Rocket locomotive, Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle, Wright Flyer, etc., and is the most frequent visited page other than the category and search pages. The Modeler's Bookstore (in association with Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble (2001), Abebooks.com (2003), Half.com (2008)) was initiated in late 1998, the Magazine stand was established later. The main purpose of these stores is to provide a starting point for serious modelers to find good modeling reference books and magazines (with good bargains, too). At the end of 2006, these stores have been integrated with a Hobby Tool aStore, a Model Kit aStore, a R/C Model aStore, a Model Railroad aStore, and a CD/Video aStore, all powered by Amazon.com, to provide an one stop shopping plaza for modelers. The Modeling News Headlines section was launched in late 1999, which is a free service for the members of the list to announce their new product, web site updates, upcoming events, special discounts, model shows and contests information.

At the beginning of 1999, to celebrate the third anniversary, the site obtained itself an easy to remember domain name, that's right, ScaleModel.NET! Hopefully, you will tell your modeling fellows this name and bring them here, and this site will lead you folks dig deep into the amazing world of scale modeling.