Interesting topic, Jim. I'll give some feedback based on how it looks from the point of view of the Donauschwaben regions. At 01:38 PM 10/8/98 -0400, Jim Eggert wrote:

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.

For the Donauschwaben pages, I think we pretty much have all the information in both languages; what isn't is more by slip than by lack of intention. (I would still like to get the Alsace & Lorraine pages into French as well one of these days.)

b. Integration with regional mailing lists.

The mailing list lives on rootsweb and is tight with FEEFHS instead, but our site has the best resources and gets mentioned and visited a lot.

c. Online surname registration.

I've never tried doing that here because it is unclear what our space limitations are and it is not my highest priority. It is being done by someone else with our cooperation and participation and it lives on FEEFHS. Actually, it probably is better situated on FEEFHS simply because FEEFHS has a search engine. Once registration gets to a certain level, a search engine is essential I believe.

d. Online queries.

This is pretty much done along with the above registration and on the mailing list.

e. Online addition of links.

You mean individuals can get their private family pages linked from a central directory? This is being done by another person with whom we are in close contact, living in Germany, maintaining his own site. We link to his site of course. I am glad that he is willing to do it as I do not have the patience to maintain the frequent comings and goings of private family pages.

f. Participation in web rings.

They make me dizzy. ;) More seriously, I want to go where I want to go, not follow a ring.

g. Site search engine (FEEFHS).

My impression is that we do not want CGI's running at QRZ. A sitewide search engine would be great though; perhaps Rainer could do it as a special only at his site? This could be another possible revenue source as well. Consider the Alta Vista search engine. They sell "keywords", that is, if you type in a word to its search engine, they will show an ad depending what word you typed in. You can bet that AT&T pays a penny to make sure that their ad shows up when "telephone" is typed and GM for automobile, etc. Rick

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