Web site design

[beddows]

Hi there, a number of members BG.com have got their their own websites, what programmes did they use to design their site, was it free and are there any tips, pitfalls that people should be aware of ?
Regards John

[busyglen]

Hi John,

There are quite a lot of answers here:

http://www.british-genealogy.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5625

they might help you as there are a variety of replies on this subject already. If not, just ask. :)

Glenys

[beddows]

Thanks for your reply,
John

[Blain]

Personally, I use a piece of software called Macromedia Homesite, which unfortunately was integrated in to Dreamweaver and is no longer available separately.
It is essentially a text editor with some added widgets.
I can handcode standard HTML and CSS, so homesite suites me perfectly, I am assuming that you cannot, so I would suggest maybe trying one of these.

Dreamweaver - http://macromedia.com
Nvu - http://nvu.com/
Mozilla Composer - http://www.mozilla.org/products/mozilla1.x/

There are also some programs that can take GedCom files and convert them in to HTML pages, but these tend to range from bad to abominable, I have yet to see one that produces code I am happy with.

[beddows]

I used PersonalWebKit and heres the results, its the begining needs alot more info to be added.
Very easy programme, abit limited but easy to use and upload.

regards John

[busyglen]

It's coming along fine John, but may I make one observation?

I have a wide screen, but each page of text disappears on the right, so I have to scroll to read it....this can quite often put people off. Is it possible for you to make the margin on the left a bit smaller?

I'm no expert, but perhaps someone else can advise how to get around it.

Good luck! :)

Glenys

[MarkJ]

Hi John,
First time I have looked at the page.
The ancestry link leads to another link - My Ancestors Page - which is linked to your PC drive. It may be that you have not dealt with this section as yet - but of course the link is not correct.

On the Contacts page - the writing extends outside the white box on my screen (1024x768, Firefox browser) on the right. On other pages, the writing does remain inside the box - but is very close to the right hand edge.
I guess this is the same issue as Glenys is experiencing - just showing differently on the differing browsers or screen widths.

I agree with Glenys - it is coming along nicely. Looks generally clean and loads quickly - both things I particularly look for.

Cheers,
Mark

[peter nicholl]

Hi John
I use Serif WebPlus, it was not expensive and it works without having to use html. As a matter of choice I have not put a "Tree" on the site, but prefer a written style. I find any large Tree hard to follow, either too small to be read, or too large to navigate. A friend once compared it to trying to read War & Peace through a letter box :) . My homepage is http://homepages.tesco.net/~pandin/

Peter

[beddows]

Thanks for your comments, I have a problem trying work out the margin problem as it was done on a WYSIWUG and I have not worked out how to change, would identing the paragraphs do it?

I have another problem which I think is simple to sort but I seem to have got myself in a tizz at the moment is how to link My ancestors page to a GEDmill link. Something that MarkJ mentioned
I exported from GR to GEDmill Family history website creator, the files are on my C drive as GEDmill Output, how do link them??
I have been sitting trying out things but with no joy, I thought I had done it last night but it was linking back to my C drive.
Thanks John

[MarkJ]

The link to the ancestors page you seem to have had a go at changing? It now points to another place - but presumably still not the correct one.

The relevant code is this part -

A
href="http://Beddowsfamtree/home.html">My Ancestors Page</A

I took the opening and closing tag arrows out so it won't show as a link hopefully.

I guess you uploaded the family tree to your Tiscali site?
If so, then you can probably just do "Beddowsfamtree/home.html" as long as it is in the same location as your main site.
Make sure the file names are exactly the same, including case - depending on the server, Beddows and beddows would be two different locations.
It really depends on where you put the files. The link you currently have would point to a website entitled Beddowsfamtree - which I don't think is what you have in mind.
If you have not uploaded it, then that would be your first step.

Mark

[beddows]

I have tried your suggestions but had no success, my family tree files are in my C drive, I exported from GR to a programme called GEDmill , the logic Mill that one or two on this forum have used, I have used a WUSIWYG and can not access code, I am nearly there with cracking this I just seem to have got myself going in circles, not too sure where I went wrong?

The GEDmill files 'Home' and 'Individuals' are in my documents as HTML files,
just need to make the link somehow
Thanks for your help
John

[MarkJ]

Hi John,
Lets assume you have your main site at http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/beddowsfamily/ as indeed you do.
So the acutal main index file is http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/beddowsfamily/index.html or htm - either will work probably.
Now what you need to do is to upload the html files you have on your PC - the ged created ones - to the same directory as you uploaded the index.html file (yes, you can stick them in another directory if you like - but for simplicity, lets assume this is what we are doing).
So, you presumably have a directory (or folder if you prefer) called beddowsfamily on your Tiscali webspace, with your index.html file already in it.
If you place the file called "home.html" into that same directory, then, as long as you have no other files with that name in the folder, you should be able to show the actual html file on the web by making the relevant link in your page -


A href="home.html">My Ancestors Page</A (opening and closing tags left off as before for clarity)

Hope this makes it a little less confusing - but its not the easiest thing in the world to explain really ;)

Then the same for the individuals file.

Re editing the files - you can open the website via your browser, select View, then Source code or whatever your browser calls it. You can then copy and paste it into notepad or any other text editor and make the changes.
Not as hard as it sounds - although I must admit your wysiwyg program uses a different way of coding the site than I would personally have done. But each page can be edited as mentioned - so the page you need to edit for this particular change is
http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/beddowsfamily/ancestry.htm

If it would be more useful, feel free to PM me and I am happy to see if I can assist by maybe making the code changes for you to put back on your webpage. Of course you would need to upload the files - but I am happy to do the code changes and explain what I have done if it will help.

Mark

[Mary Young]

There are also some programs that can take GedCom files and convert them in to HTML pages, but these tend to range from bad to abominable, I have yet to see one that produces code I am happy with.
I'm playing around with Dynamic Family Tree www.DftCom2.co.uk (http://www.DftCom2.co.uk). Instead of hundreds of web pages, DFT produces a group of zip files from your gedcom. These are uploaded to your web site and the display page is changed "on the fly" as you wander round the tree. It's amazingly easy and quick to update.
As far as I can see, the only downside is that Google can't index the data.
My DFT starter page http://redhunter.com/cmy/dft-lewis/example.html

[Blain]

Looks ok, but its a java applet so unfortunately not suitable for my needs.

I need something that will produce HTML code, which I can then modify to add my sites code on top.

I have tried most of the Ged to html programs and they all generate BAD HTML.

[MarkJ]

They do all tend to produce fairly bloated html - as do the wysiwyg programs most people tend to use for their basic sites.
You can of course strip a lot of the superfluous code out by hand - and I do tend to modify things by hand myself, but a wysiwyg program is very convenient. Likewise the ged to html programs - coding a website by hand to incorporate your genealogical information would be pretty heavy going. It seems a lot easier to allow your family tree program ( whatever program that may be) to produce the code, then tweak it a little afterwards. You may not be totally happy with the result - but it will save a lot of time.
It would be interesting to know which programs produce the cleanest code. I am fairly limited as to which programs I can use anyway, as I do not use Windows.

Mark

[Blain]

I have extremely high standards when it comes to producing websites, I handcode all my sites using valid and semantic HTML, all presentation and layout is done via CSS etc.
Of the Ged to HTML programs I have used, some merely failed because they use tables for laying out the page, to other that actually produced the entire page in <pre> tags.
For the amount of tweaking that I would need to do to be happy with the code, it would probably be quicker to handcode the entire thing.
Although I have to admit GEDMill does look promising.

[beddows]

With the help and support of MarkJ from this forum, my site is slowly getting there and my knowledge and understanding about website design has greatly improved over the weekend.
I used PersonalWebKit to design, GENmill to transfer my familytree from GR http://www.logicmill.com/ and IPswitch WS_FTP http://www.ipswitch.com/ to upload my site to tiscali.

Regards John

[Blain]

Mark

I am looking at GEDmill at the moment, and it produces code to XHTML strict.
You cannot get much cleaner than that.

[Mythology]

I am no lover of family tree programmes of any sort, but I looked at some pages created by GEDmill by a friend and, as these things go, it does seem to be quite good.
No use to Mark though - he doesn't use Windows.

[Blain]

You can run windows app on linux using an emulator
you can run .net framework in linux using mono (http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page)

You should therefore be able to run gedmill on linux.

[MarkJ]

Yes, you can run various Windows program with Wine. I do have Wine, although I don't often use it. I will look at the Gedmill program - I saw the files which John produced with it and it looks quite interesting. I shall see how it works with my (rather large) gedcom file. The program I use for my family tree - Gramps - is very good, but the conversion to html is a little bulky I find.
I shall download and give Gedmill a go and report back :)

Edit: Well, even with the mono framework installed, GEDmill still wants .NET.
Some research into this seems to indicate that so far there is no practical way forward on this.
http://wiki.winehq.org/Mono-Wine_bridge?highlight=%28.NET%29 has some comments on it, including a link to a method of installing the .net framework under wine. Not ideal though.
Of course, I could borrow one of the girls PCs and copy my gedcom to Gedmill running on their Windows machines ;)
I came across phpGedView some time ago - which looks interesting. I may look into that later. It has some interesting ideas for collaborative work with family members.

Mark

[beddows]

My website is going really well, had over 1850 hits from all over the world and had lots of positive emails from people who knew my family or the area of Liverpool where we came from.

I have also had 2 contacts from the Shropshire line of the family resulting in further research to link in three different strands of the family tree.

[MarkJ]

Looking good John!
I must remember to point your site out to one of my friends who has just started researching her family history. She is from the Liverpool area so would find your site interesting.

Mark

[beddows]

Hi Mark,
hope you are well as you can see my site is coming along really nice and have some really good enquiries from all over the world.
Send the link to your friend and also my contact details more that happy to help out.
Nice to see that you are still with us,
John

[julianb]

Beddows asked originally on this thread about software used for web design.

I have used Net Objects Fusion 7 for my site. It is a WYSIWYG program, and I found I got the hang of it pretty quickly. There are site style templates that came with the package, although you can design your own, or just adapt the given styles (which is what I did).

It cost me the price of a computer magazine (it was a giveaway on a cover disc). The drawback for the family historian is that it does not integrate at all with any gedcom input. It could be used as the front end for a family history software produced site - I have though just entered the data myself. When I set the site up, I imported a lot of material from a Word document. While this was quick, it did "bloat the code" a bit, and I have had to go back and redo pages - not least because the tables I imported didn't look right in Firefox browsers (and I'm still in the process of doing that).

Net Objects Fusion 8 (the next version) is currently featuring on a number of computer magazine cover discs.

I hope this is helpful.

JULIAN

[beddows]

Hi Julian,
thanks for your reply, had a look at your site, has a nice feel about it and you have taken a different approach from me but both serve their purposes.

It nice to look at other sites to see how people have designed their site and how to display the information.
Regards John