For months whilst I have been putting the site together, I kept it pretty much under wraps, whilst it was there, I hadn't let anyone know apart from a couple of immediate family who helped by seeing how some of the pages looked on their various types and sizes of screen.
Just a few weeks ago I decided that incomplete as it still is, the basic narrative and family trees were ready enough to let people see and hopefully not just attract ridicule for having a totally crap site. It is rather clunky, probably over complicated and dated looking but it is about as good as I can get it with my level of web-writing skills.
My days of writing websites and playing with HTML are long gone, and things have moved on the point where if I look at the HTML for most web pages I struggle to understand much of it. So for this site I have stuck to a cheapo WYSIWYG type of hosting. This I find rather irritating but it does the job.
Templates are fine but nobody has produced anything that remotely caters for an extensive genealogy website. So I end up feeling constrained that I cant make it do what I want. At the same time having too accept that if I tried starting afresh and learning more up to date web writing skills It would take so long asd to effectively never happen.
So it is what it is, the site is not going to win any prizes but the information is there. Hopefully it is not too hard to navigate and the information can be found without too much difficulty.
People are starting to find the site but it is only ever going to have a tiny audience. As I say somewhere, a detailed history of someone else family is never going to interest many. I have told some of my "Ancestry" contacts where to find the site and whenever I make any sort of comment on a tree I try to get a little plug in. Hopefully if I can just get it in front of a few peoples eyes they will tell others. I have got it so as the site is easily found on Google, Bing and suchlike so with a bit of luck a few people will be curious enough too venture in.
Glory of glories, a couple off lovely people have not only looked but have bothered to leave nice comments on the feedback page.
What does surprise me is where the people are who are reading the site. Some are in China, Vietnam and Laos !! Like why ?? what possible interest can a British family history be to them. Not that I mind all traffic is good traffic, I am just curious. Outside of the UK the vast majority of the hits are from USA, Canada and Australia all very much as expected. Also as expected most are using a PC, laptop or larger tablet to view the site. This is just as well as it looks total crap on a phone!!
That will do me for now, watch this space for further musings and thanks again for visiting the site.
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