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.
Is this different from the new website featured in the LDS Church news at
http://pilot.familysearch.org?
@Roland
Ancestry.com is a commercial company which supports genealogy research. There are some similarities between Ancestry and pilot.familysearch.org, which also offers the general public the ability to search census data online. The differences are that Ancestry has significantly more census data available, but to get the full record, you need a paid subscription or to use a computer at one of the approved LDS Family History Libraries. (I can’t seem to find the full list, but I know that in Utah you have to go to the Ogden or Salt Lake City FHL for free Ancestry.com access) All information available at familysearch.org is freely available.
Okay..I have a technical issue, although not related to this post. lol I want to be added to “Mormon blogs” but when I click on the “email us”, I can’t seem to do it. Do you have their email address? If so, could you email it to me? Thanks!