Sharing Family Memories: How to Successfully Organize a Family Website
Posted on Thursday, March 01 @ 19:34:55 EST by kishan
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As in any website, there are two questions to ask yourself when you create a family website. The first is what you intend to get out of the site, and the second is to whom you are speaking.
Presuming a genealogy site for a family, there are several givens. Names, dates, places and relationships are pretty much required in order for anything to be of use to anyone who isn’t already knowledgeable about them, and they probably don’t need your site. You can focus on a specific person, on a nuclear family, on an extended nuclear family or any of a number of other options. The reasoning behind the site can also change. As you learn more about the subject, you can change from using the site to see if any other research will connect their subjects to yours so you can use the information they’ve developed to presenting what you believe to be pretty much the complete story for the convenience of others.
Depending on your target audience, other information can be presented. Pictures can be helpful, and can be interesting, providing a tidbit of potential interest to genealogists and people who are just dabbling. Details on education, military service and accomplishments can greatly flesh out the narrative from bald statements about birth, marriage and death dates. This can create far more of a sense of dealing with people instead of tables of information.
One of the real advantages of a website over traditional scrapbooks is that it is easy to rework the layout and content since there is no physical copy to cut up and recreate. This provides much freedom by removing much of the pressure to start with perfection. New versions, as you find something out, are easy and painless. Another is that it is trivial for lots of people to use your work at once, rather than having to pass a singular scrapbook around. Finally, the use of search engines means that while a scrapbook may never come to the attention of someone who needs the information, a search might well turn up the website, putting the information into the hands of those seeking it.
When it comes to the task of presenting information, the simplest method is to organize as one page with everything starting and the beginning and moving on from there, like a big, virtual fold out page with a family tree in an old novel. This works just fine, provided the quantity of information isn’t so large that it chokes the user. For instance, a big page with lots of pictures can easily hang up for someone on dial-up connections. For those situations, you can split your “page” into multiple “pages.” Whether coding html by hand or using a pagemaker program of some kind, this is a simple task that can be done in a couple of ways. Care must be taken to find some logical organization that makes it easy to find the specific information the user is seeking, or to simply browse through the pageant of history.
About Author
Author: Govindji Patel
Please visit my websites at:
http://www.myadstracker.com
http://www.newgenealogy.com
http://www.hot-conference.com
http://www.thenicheonline.com
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