Genealogy Websites are Boring!

So said a recent tweeter. My instinctive reaction was that part of the problem was that the designers are trying to cater for the higher proportion than average of genealogists who still use IE6. But on reflection I think this to be unfair.

Is it True?

I made the basic assumption that the comment did not refer to the research aids, such as Ancestry.com, so over the past month I have made a point of looking at many genealogists' own sites. and, regrettably, I think that it is probably fair comment.

Part of the problem is that the sites are presented by genealogists many of whom, I suspect, have little or no experience of designing and coding websites. Many are, therefore forced to use sites such as Rootsweb, rely on their database program, or use a program which converts a GEDCOM into webpages. This is not a criticism, in fact I applaud the efforts made by all who seek to make their work available to others, and I know how hard they try to overcome the problems which they inevitably meet. Indeed I have used a standard template for this blog!

The image above is of my own website; now I am not a designer but can code, so the design is one which I have put together from looking at pages in books or on-screen. I make no pretence about it being of a high standard, but at least I'm happy with it! I have shown this to illustrate that it is not necessary for all pages to look dull. This is true for the many different types of pages which can be added to a site, for example, forums, blogs, tutorials, biographies etc. etc.

Options

However, I suspect that the tweeter was referring to a lack of dynamic pages, and with the best will in the world, here we have a problem; which is that the family genealogy which we may wish to display basically comprises a list of names and other data. No matter what one does with it, it is still a list. The Next Generation of Genealogy Software, based on PHP and SQL overcomes this by using selections of family trees from which one can link to details of each individual.

My personal favourite is the Pedigree style from Legacy where the notes are included on the same page as the tree, which I prefer, although it is not as dynamic as TNG. It also has another problem in that it requires one page per individual, which means it is not really suitable for very large sites, I currently have around some 6000 such pages. I do include a dynamic family tree, made using DftCom2 based on Java, on a separate page of my site.

When it comes to other formats, Descendant, Ancestor, Family Group, Individual, we are down to lists, they may be formatted differently but they are still lists. For very large sites there may be no alternative other than to use one of these options, or TNG. There are a few other programs but the user experience is similar to those mentioned. I understand some university work is being carried out on alternative formatting, but as yet this has not been taken up.

What can we do?

At present, the best solution would seem to be to create a wide selection of attractive pages to complement the lists of genealogy data from which we hope others will contact us, and hence expand our knowledge and/or trees

© Ron Ferguson 2010