You basically have three kinds of items to present to the public:
(1) Your family records which will consist of pedigrees, family data and biographical materials.
(2) Your documentation which could consist of photocopies (or scanned images) of original papers
such as wills, deeds, marriage certificates; Your transcriptions/abstracts from sources.
(3) Picture Album items.
Everthing that will go onto your host's site will have been typed up into your own computer.
If you are just presenting one surname/family name, you will need a Homepage file for that
surname on your computer for the files of coded information. If you think you will ever add
another surname to your site, you will need to plan ahead for that eventuality. You might
want to name each file according to the first letter of that surname. For instance, all my
Phillips files start with P. Naming your files is very important when it comes to transferring
them to your host site. You will find that after you have transferred them, they all show up
in one big file on your host's site. So even though you might have them on your computer
in different files, remember that the host does not make any distinction. That means that
you must give each file a distinct name when you create it.
If you have a file for marriages of Dallas County, Missouri (for instance) but you have sorted o
out the files to the surnames you are researching, you wouldn't want to just name it MO-dal-mg.
because that could only apply to one file. You will need to devise your own abbreviations
that
you use for your way of distinguishing one file from another. If I were to put my Phillips
names for Dallas Co. under the same file name for my Hildebrands of Dallas Co., the file
would be overwritten and only the last one entered would appear on the website. So there is
this little bit of planning to do before you proceed.
Everyone will devise their own system of creating files and folders. It just takes a bit of
planning. On my computer file, I can distinguish between document files and family files.
then I also keep a separate folder for picture albums. There is always an index page for
a family album so I keep a separate file on my computer called "albums". I keep the album
index page as it is continually updated. However, I only have 2 gig of hard drive at this
time, so after a photo is scanned in, or sent to me in email, I save it to my hard drive
just long enough to transfer it to the host site and make a back-up copy. Then I delete it
from my hard drive both in my mailroom and the hard drive. There is no need to keep these
very large jpg files on my own computer. I plan to burn some CDs with my collection of
back-up files. Go to View and Source to see this album: index.
This one is organized according to the major chapters in the book.
Again, the website is organized by these three main types of files. There are index pages
for each surname for documentation and for the biographical sketches. As you need to update
the information, you can pull up whichever file you need, do the update on your own computer,
and then transfer it to the host site, overwriting that file. My album pages are linked from
my family files. See Jeremiah Sweaney
Once you have your family album pages established, you can go back through your biographies
and make a link to that person's photo wherever it is needed in the text. This one is a link
from someone else's website for Bushwhacker Sam which was sent in
by the owner of that site.