Re: Looking to improve my genealogy site - feeback?

Denis Beauregard wrote:

If you sincerely want to improve your site, delete all the
advertisements and the external links and ask yourself if you
really have something for the visitor. Browsing through a ton
of advertisements where you have to search for original material
is not something fun.

And if you want to make money from your site, then post into
soc.genealogy.marketplace, not this newsgroup.

Denis


Denis,
Thanks for the feeback. I do have a ton of actual content in the
site... and my site statistics show about 35% of my monthly users
bookmark at least one page, so that tells me that many people are
finding useful information... I'd love to have my site ad free, but it
is necessary because the site costs money to host. None of the content
in my site is fee-based (So does it really fit into
soc.genealogy.marketplace?), so it is dependant on the sponsor ads, and
donations, to offset server expenses. I'm not making any profit.

My homepage has the most ads and links to 3rd-party sites, (I should
organize them into sections, and prune some of them out, probably)...
the content pages are limited to a couple google adsense ads, which I
feel are tastefully placed, to allow for easy viewing of the content,
and some pages have related book advertisements on them. The books I
list are all hand selected. Admittedly, some of the pages deeper into
my site are out of date, and have some garbage ads, from when I first
started webdesigning, over 7 years ago. I'm working on cleaning those
areas up as I can find them.

Honestly, my goal with this website is not to line my pockets, but to
share data with other researchers, and publish external links to other
sites that provide useful content. If I can ever find a way to not
worry about paying the server costs, I'll go ad-free. I refuse to host
on another service, (I lease server space from a major datacenter, and
resell extra resources) because of reliability issues. I've gone with
other hosting companies before, but got fed up and decided to cut out
the middle man. I'm a stubborn Irish / Norwegian, lol.

With that said, I will try to figure out how to clean up my homepage a
bit.

Now, back to my original question... what research areas are you
interested in? What topics should I cover or go into more depth about?

Peace,
Shawn
http://www.quillspirit.org

.

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