| Concept |
Most personal genealogical websites consist of a few massive pages generated by commercial genelogical programs. Whilst this may be simple to do, I have always considered such pages to be remarkably ineffective in conveying useful information.
By contrast, this site consists of a large number of small pages each containing genealogical information on one of my ancestors. Each page contains links to seperate pages for the individual's parents, spouse, & children. My following successive links it is possible to follow family connections over multiple generations.
Additional pages giving general information (such as this one) are also utilized.
This simple technique allows for infinite expansion, and allows for links to similar pages on other genealogical websites.
So if you find that you are related to any of my ancestors, please let me know, then if you decide to set up similar pages for your ancestors, I can establish links to your pages. If everybody on the web does this, the possibility exists for creating a global genealogical web showing how everyone is related. This web of pages would be run by genealogical researches distributed around the world, and would thus be free from the increasing commercial exploitation of genealogical material.
The pages are far more useful than those produced by commercial genealogy programs which typically generate huge web pages containing thousands of names. Such pages are a total menace to search engine users, as a search for any name will inevitably return hundreds of such pages, most if not all of which will be utterly irrelevent. By publishing small pages with information specific to one individual it is far easier to search for relevant information.
Similar pages can be recognized in search results by their small page size (only a few k), and also by the page being named after an individual. I would strongly recommend to authors putting the word "Genealogy" in the page title, as this not only makes it abundantly clear what the page is about, but gives a primary keyword to search for.
All individual genealogical pages on this site are less than 5000 bytes at present.
Developed independently by myself in 1996, this concept can also be seen on a number of other privately run genealogical websites.
Great minds think alike!
Examples of other sites using this concept: