REAP THE BENEFITS OF THE WEB
Paul Carter
Over the past 20 years, the Internet and World Wide Web have increasingly become part of daily life, to the point where we think nothing of communicating via email, shopping for products, sharing stories on social media or watching a television programme online. The process of researching family history has been transformed over this period as new records are digitised and our favourite pastime becomes more accessible to us in our homes.
But have you considered publishing your own website describing your family history? If you’re unsure what content you’d include or are daunted by how to go about constructing such a site, this article offers some guidance and practical steps to help you produce a successful family history website.
Why have a website for your family history?
Finding and connecting with distant relatives is a big part of what we seek to do as family historians. Those connections, sharing common ancestry, may well have more information or heirlooms to help us expand our own knowledge of the family. This is a key reason why online family trees have proven so popular.
The Internet, with its vast global audience, serves as the vehicle to tell your family story and enable those connections to find you. If you’re researching a specific surname or village, a website becomes even more important, as you’ll wish to locate potential non-relatives with a name in common or former residents of that place.
Conversely, its purpose may simply be to share information with your more immediate family, if they live in different parts of the country or world.
Whatever your reasons, before you proceed further, it’s sensible to think about the purpose of your website and therefore consider the type of audience you wish to attract.
Planning your website structure
Before starting to build a website, take some time to plan it, making the task easier and ensuring a better, more structured, result. Well-designed websites have a clear hierarchy of content, which may be represented in a similar way to a genealogical pedigree chart.
The opening page of your website (the home page) acts as an introduction, describing your content and guiding visitors towards the underlying pages. The other content pages lead off from the home page. A simple website, of a few pages, may be one sub-level deep, while larger more complex websites could contain many levels.
Whatever your website structure, it’s important to consider how easy it is to access content so your visitors find it readily. A rule of thumb for this is the ‘three-click rule’ (see below right). Use this to see how simple your pages are to find and ensure they are in their logical place.
With your initial structure planned, you now have the outline of your website’s navigation; the section of your website containing the links to other pages and content, known as the navigation or menu bar.
The navigation should reflect the website’s structure, so lower level pages are accessed underneath the top-level page, on what is called a submenu. The main menu and submenus are known collectively as the menu hierarchy.
An example of this can be seen on the website for genealogist Celia Heritage. The navigation bar runs horizontally across the top of each page of the website and hovering over a menu item displays the submenu below that section.
4 key components needed to publish a website