There are several deleterious tendencies evident in many of the WorldGenweb sites that I think we have thus far successfully avoided in our German genealogy website: 1. Gratuitous use of color/backgrounds/images/sounds/etc. 2. Links to irrelevant sites/services. 3. Excessive personalization ("vanity pages"). We also have the advantage of greater numbers of Germans on our team. Proximity to the sources, clubs, and archives is of great benefit. On the other hand, other sites do some things better than we: a. Universal page availability in English. b. Integration with regional mailing lists. c. Online surname registration. d. Online queries. e. Online addition of links. f. Participation in web rings. g. Site search engine (FEEFHS). One may argue whether all of these are good things. In fact I have argued in the past against online surname registration, and wonder whether web rings are useful at all. But perhaps these things should be revisited. I thus propose we attempt to restructure our web pages along these lines, with the first one replaced by: a'. Universal page availability in German and English. Discussion is invited. -- =Jim Eggert EggertJ@LL.mit.edu