Tutorial 5: Publishing Your Family History Website

This is the final chapter in a series of tutorials about publishing a family history website. In this article I'll discuss how to publish (post) your family history information.

One of the best ways to share your family history information, and make contact with distant family members, is to publish the information to the Web. Once published your information will be indexed by search engines so that your site can be found by others.

Free blogging sites

The simplest and cheapest way to get your family history site up and running is to sign up for a free blog at a either Blogger or Wordpress. Both sites offer a free website and all of the tools you'll need to post and edit pages. Most people think of blogs as online diaries or opinion articles but you can post anything, including pictures, to these pages. We use Blogger for one of our 'Bugs sites and have been very happy with it.

One big advantage of hosting your site as a blog is that blogs accept comments from users giving your site a level of interactivity. Visitors can post comments or questions that other users, or you, can respond to. The downside of free blogs is that you give up control over how the site operates and what features can be implemented.

Building your site from scratch

The other option is to build your site from scratch. You'll need to be familiar with html (the programming language of websites) and how servers and web hosting works. The first step is to get a domain name and hosting service. The domain name is the unique address of your site. For example "calyphoto.com" is the domain and address of Calypso's Roots. Domain names can generally be purchased through the same companies that host your site. We use WebHero as our hosting company.

Image and document formats

Whether you use a free blog site or build your own site from scratch you'll need content to fill it. Text and pictures (images) will probably be your primary content and you may add sound and video when you become more proficient.

Certain image file formats are better suited for Web content than others. Continuous tone photographs should be saved as "jpeg" files, medium or high quality compression and around 72 ppi (see your image editing software for how to save a jpeg file). The "gif" format is best used for images that have a limited number of colors such as logos or banners.

If you have documents with complex formatting, such as family trees, or content that you'd like protect with a password then the portable document format (pdf) from Adobe can be used. Most programs can produce pdf files from the printer menu but you'll need a separate program, Adobe Acrobat, to add features like password protection.