Building your own website

[marquette]

Does anyone have their own family history website ? Did you build it yourself ? Is it hard to maintain? Do you get lots of "hits" - and do you want to ?

My daughter wants to practice her website making skills by making me a website for our family history.

I have an idea what I want it to look like and do, will it be too hard ?

I did think I might be nice so that the kids and other rellies could know what I have found about their ancestors.

But I don't want it just to be another family tree, as I have several on ancestry and GR, as well as a PAF database.

I want it to be more - I would like to be able to put all the basic data - birth, death, marriage, children, census and /or electoral rolls, but also a space for all stories I am collecting, interesting facts or obscure data.

Some of these things don't fit well into PAF or ancestry trees.

I may attach some photos and maybe other interesting bits but I don't really want to attach birth/death marriage certs (well, I really don't know why not, but it seems really personal even if they are dead). I guess I should also document sources, so that others can know I have done "proper research" not just downloaded from other websites.

Any thoughts appreciated

Diane

[scuda]

This is the one I run with my sister: northglospitmans.wordpress.com

Deliberately designed to be not family tree, but to include interesting information, and more of a one-name site, I suppose. wordpress.com is free and fairly easy to use, although it took a bit of getting used to. I choose to pay a little each year to keep the site free of adverts.

If you have any questions about it post them here or pm me.

scuda

[marquette]

Thanks scuda,
My daughter wants to use wix, which she is familiar with, so we might start there.
Mine would be not so much a one-name study as I would like to cover both OHs family and mine. We have some interesting but not famous, or even infamous ancestors.

And having thought about it, I would probably like to include a calender or timeline, but I think that might be a lot of work and a long term goal perhaps.

I might pose some more questions as we get started, we are just planning how it will look at the moment.

Di

[scuda]

I think all that you want would be possible with wordpress, and quite possibly with wix (although I've never used it). It seems to me you can do pretty much what you like. Just build pages one at a time, perhaps think of them as chapters in a book, and link them however you want. As long as you use a free site there's nothing to be lost by giving it a go. Play around with the options and explore what's possible.

Good luck.

scuda

[Mary from Italy]

If you have your own domain and the Microsoft Office package, you could also use Microsoft Publisher to create your site. I've been thinking of doing that, but I haven't had time to play around with Publisher to see how difficult it is.