Designing A Genealogical Website

Researching our family tree has become a top national pastime, and with the advent of the Internet, it’s also become much faster and easier than before.

As more and more information is placed online, you can afford to relax and research in the comfort of your own home, at your convenience.

The only problem is where and how do you start? 

Be Unique

To attract as many visitors as possible you need to offer something unique that encourages visitors to stop and explore.  Be creative. Look around and find out what existing genealogical sites offer, then seek to fill the void.

Pick a unique topic, name or location that doesn’t have much coverage. Better still, pick something that doesn’t have any coverage at all. If you really want to post a surname site, you can perhaps develop a site for your surname in a particular country or county, or consider posting transcribed records from a particular place that would benefit genealogists who are researching ancestors from that area. 

Include Key Surnames & Contact Info On Your Home Page

Be be sure to include a list of the names that you’re researching.  Don’t be stingy with information: a simple list of surnames isn’t going to be much help to visitors to your site, particularly if any of the surnames on your list are common – Smith, Johnson, Jones, Martin, and so forth. You need to provide enough information to enable other researchers to link their family tree into yours.

An online version of the information contained in your GEDCOM does the job well.  It includes an index of surnames that people can look through and also gives information about your ancestors with those surnames.

Be sure to include your name and email address on the site so that people are able to get in touch with you in order to share data.

Make It Attractive But Don’t Be To Flashy

Choose your colours and graphics wisely. Although using some colour and graphics (including photographs) makes it more personal and easier on the eye, be careful about using too much colour or too many graphics. Before using neon pink or lime green, stop and consider how others may react.

Genealogy Online For Dummies

This extract is taken from Genealogy Online For Dummies – UK Edition which costs £15.99 from all good bookshops.

Alternatively you can purchase it online at Amazon for £9.59.

The more graphics you use and the larger they are, the longer a computer takes to load them. Animated graphics are even worse. Use graphics tastefully and sparingly.  If you have a large number of family photos that you’d like to share, put each picture on its own page, and then provide links to the photo pages from your home page. 

The amount of bandwidth of your internet connection and the amount of space available on your hard drive also affect the download time, and you can’t assume all genealogists are going to have cutting-edge home computers. Waiting for a page to load that contains more graphics than useful text is frustrating – you can guarantee that people lose interest at the smallest provocation, so concentrate on making your page as user-friendly as possible from the beginning.

To shrink the size of the graphics on your site, try using a graphics optimier, a tool that formats your graphics to make them load faster.

A good graphics optimiser is NetMechanic GIFBot.

Always Cite Your Sources

Always cite your sources when you put genealogical narrative on your site or when you post information from records you’ve collected or people you’ve interviewed. If you cite your sources rigorously, people who visit your page and take data from it can see exactly where you obtained the information and can follow it up if they want to.

Remember That Not All Web Browsers Are Credited Equal

Different web browsers interpret HTML documents differently depending on who credited the software and some have HTML tags that are specific to the browser. So, although you may create a site that looks professional and exciting using Microsoft Internet Explorer, it may look off-centre or somewhat different when using Netscape Navigator or Opera. So try not to use tags that are specific to any one browser when you create your site.

Whenever possible, test your page in several browsers before posting it for public access.

Better still, use a testing service that allows the experts to look at your page and give you feed-back. The Yahoo! HTML Validation & Checkers page provides a list of programs that offer a testing service.

Another consideration when designing your page is to make your web pages readable by screen-reading browser.

Check & Recheck Your Links

If you include links on your home page to other websites, double-check your links when you post your pages. A lot of genealogical sites tend to be transient and the maintainers move them or take them down so run a check once a month or so to make sure that the links still work.

If you have a lot of links on your site get them checked automatically with a program that checks your site and notifies you about broken ones such as the Yahoo! HTML Validation and Checkers page.

Market Your Web Site

Once you’ve posted the site on your provider’s server, you need to let people know that it exists.

Use mailing lists of sites that deal with particular surnames or geographical areas and register it with several comprehensive genealogical websites that receive a lot of traffic from people looking for genealogy-related pages.

Also, most of the major engines have links to registration or submission pages within their sites that enable you to submit your URL. Or to save time, visit AddMe which forwards your website information to up to 14 search engines for free.

You can also try:

Submit Express

Ervsoft FastSubmit

Search Engine Submission & Optimization

The following online sites have links to many resources for designing and programming web pages. These resources have colours, backgrounds, graphics, and other website enhancements available to download.

Yahoo! World Wide Web Beginner’s Guides

Web Building Tutorial

This extract is taken from Genealogy Online For Dummies – UK Edition which costs £15.99 from all good bookshops.

Alternatively you can purchase it online at Amazon for £9.59.

Bookmark with:

• Delicious
• Digg
• reddit
• StumbleUpon

Don’t know what this is?

Read the 50connect Guide To Social Bookmarking.