Ancestry.com redesign offers personalized content
David July 9th, 2008
Ancestry.com has recently redesigned its home page to make its site easier to navigate. They have combined elements from the old home page and the My Ancestry tab to provide the following information:
- Summary of recent activity on your family tree
- List of new historical records made available
- Links to flagged records in your data for easy retrieval
- Links to often used resources
- Personal research tasks
- Recent searches and records viewed on the site
This type of redesign follows a common trend of popular site to provide personalized content for users. The display of recent family tree activity stops shy of offering a full-fledged social networking support, but this type of functionality may not be far away. Already About.com lists nine other sites which support more interactive communication between researchers. Traditional social networking sites such as Facebook offer plug-in applications such as We’re Related to offer limited genealogy research functionality. This plug-in is being used by nearly 6 million users and was acquired in June 2008 by FamilyLink.com for an undisclosed amount.