How To Organize A Family Website

If you learn how to organize a family website effectively, it can become a great way to display your family’s activities to friends and family, stay in touch with relatives, or chronicle major life events.

1. Decide What You Want From Your Family Website Before starting any project, it’s a good idea to take some time to identify what your goals are. Do you want your website to be a place for relatives and old friends from around the country to be able to see the major life steps happening in each of your family members’ lives? Or is this website more a place for your immediate family to stay in touch and interact online? Do you want to have lots of photos and other memorabilia posted and use it as an archive of memories?
2. Decide Where to Host Your Family Website Once you figure out exactly what it is you want your family website to be, you can use that information to decide where to host your family website. A website host is the computer or system of computers that stores your website and makes it accessible online. The simplest form of a website is a blog. Consider the limitations (the majority of information is restricted to posts) and benefits (it’s really easy to update) of a blog and decide if it would meet your need. If not, there are many different websites out there that offer pre-formatted websites so all you have to do is type in the information and keep it updated, much like a blog, but with pages instead of posts and a more horizontal layout. If you want to do your own formatting, your best bet is to buy or download website design software like Dreamweaver or learn HTML basics.
3. How to Organize Your Family Website If you are the only one who is going to edit and update your website, you should organize the website in the most efficient way. If each family member has their own page, make sure you create a folder for each person so you can keep filenames simple and organized. If your website is going to be organized chronologically, you might want to make folders for each year or month and organize images and files that way.
4. Space for the Kids If you have kids who are interested in helping out or experimenting with making a website, create a folder specifically for them. That way, they won’t accidentally delete or edit pages that you’ve been working on. For younger kids, web design software will be the most enjoyable. For older kids, encourage them to try out HTML and more complex web design techniques. Remember that you can always have pages on your website that aren’t linked to, so you can preview pages or your kids can have practice pages that the public doesn’t have to see.
5. Adding Photos Arranging large amounts of photos on a website one at a time can be a real nightmare. If you are aiming for a photo album section, consider using a photo organizing website. You can still add captions and organize them by date or subject, but you won’t have to place them individually on your website. For photos used to illustrate certain pages on your website, consider decreasing their file size before uploading them to your website to make your web page load faster.
6. Privacy The fast majority of websites on the internet are not easy to find unless you are specifically looking for it. Most web hosts will give you the option to not be listed in search engine results. If you want a guarantee on privacy, consider adding a password feature to the front page. You can also just add a password to specific pages. That way, you can give family and friends who you want to see the website the password, or you can make it something that only close friends and family would know, such as the name of a pet or where one of your kids was born.