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Planning a genealogy website?

You've been collecting data on your family for years, and want to share what you've found. Or maybe you've just started researching your family and hope to find new cousins by putting your names on line. But where do you start? Spend some time in planning your genealogy website before you start.

Purpose of Your Web Site:

What is the purpose of the site you are planning? Do you have one or more genealogy databases you would like to share with family or fellow researchers. Do you have family stories or photos you would like to share? Are you looking to do a single surname study? Or is it to track descendants of an individual, or to present data on a particular region? Determine the purpose before you do anything else. Frequently you have to view the entire page of someone's web site to find out what the purpose of the page or site is. Or you may view the home page and still not know what the site is about. Tell your visitor what you site is about and what information they might find there.

Audience for your Web Site:

Who is your audience - family and friends? Or are you trying to appeal to the beginning genealogists, seasoned genealogists, people who are only slightly interested in their family tree, or what? What does the audience want? Do they want compiled data, individualized records with source citations, or links to other web sites based on a surname? If you don't know what your audience wants and provide them with the information, you will have very few repeat visitors.

Presentation of a Genealogy Web Site:

A typical genealogist wants data and does not want to waste time viewing large/animated graphics that do not pertain to the subject. Yes, there are exceptions. They are also not interested in music that you think is so great especially if they happen to be using a library computer. They want data, plain and simple. They want that page to come up in the fastest time possible. Know who your audience is. Some do want fancy stuff, but the MAJORITY of genealogists do not.

Developing Your Genealogy Web Site

• Hosting your site - The first step is to decide what information you want to put online and then find a place to put it. Do you want to publish a linked family tree or trees including everyone in your database? Or do you want to present a written family history, with pages of text, photos and source documents?
  • Free space at  Rootsweb - there are several types of accounts available. Select the one that is right for your space. There is an agreement for how the space can be used. If you don't agree, you will not be granted space. 
    • Freepages Accounts - personal web space. Choose a name for your site and write down the email address you use. You will need it in the future. Whatever name you choose will become part of the url of your site, so choose carefully. You cannot change it once selected. I used gearyfamily so my site address was http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~gearyfamily/ which at the time reflected what my site was about. Example: Monroe County New York Records The banner ads at top and bottom of pages are what allows you to have the free space.
    • County, State, World Project Accounts - USGenWeb, WorldGenWeb, ALHN, AHGP, other locality-based projects, etc. Example: Montgomery County Virginia GENWEB As of 2008, many of the GenWeb Projects have moved to their own servers.
    • Genealogical/Historical Society Accounts - includes lineage societies, libraries, museums, etc. Example: Massanutton Chapter NSDAR
  • WorldConnect at RootsWeb - The WorldConnect Project is where you can upload your family trees in the form of a GEDCOM file.
  • Paid Hosting - there are many choices. I use 1&1 web hosting  NOW but for years used RootsWeb FreePages. You can read a review of 1&1 hosting. Sites are as low as $2.99 per month which includes one free domain name. While it is recommended that you register your domain in one place and host your site in another, this will give you the opportunity to try out some of the things you cannot do on a free site and there is no advertising. My Family Genealogy site is hosted by 1&1. NameCheap is a good place to register your domain name if you choose to go that route. They quite often offer discount coupons. Remember that these will be ongoing expenses for your site.
• Organizing and designing the setup of your site - Before you can begin to design your pages, you need an organization plan. Will you drop all pages, images, and related files into one directory/folder? After a while it will be difficult to find things. Organize your site just like you would your filing cabinet. Do it NOW rather than later to save yourself lots of headaches.
• Choosing a web editor - Whether you decide to use a WYSIWYG editor or Notepad, you need some way to create your html code. The resources page will give you information on some of the HTML editors available both free and commercial. You may decide to your the FreePages online editor provided by Rootsweb but I would only recommend it for very basic pages.
• Create, validate, and test your site
• Customize your site
• Uploading / publishing your site
• Maintaining your site

Blog Your Family History

You could choose to  use a genealogy blog to document your family history search. A blog, short for "web log," is basically an online journal. You can add  text, graphic images and allow others to add comments as part of your Blog.  You can either sign up for an account through a Weblog host like Blogger.com, or run a blog publishing system on your own Web server such as WordPress. If you already have your own domain hosted on a server, you might be interested in Launching a WordPress Blog, a FREE EBook by Tina Clarke and Pat Geary, both Microsoft MVP's - FrontPage. This is a step-by-step tutorial for launching your own WordPress Blog.

You can also request a free WordPress Blog to be hosted on the WordPress site. All you need is your name and an email address. If you already have a blog elsewhere and would like to move it over to WordPress.com, they provide several import options that can import posts and comments.

 

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