I found when building my family tree that I eventually wanted to build a web site to host the ever changing information. As a web designer I have built many web pages for personal and business use. This time I knew it was going to be a more daunting task then a few templates with information dropped into them. I wanted all of the notes pages to be viewable and links to both ancestors and descendants.
My Family Tree Maker software wouldn’t handle the number of individuals that were in my file. The maximum number of individuals was about 2,000 and my family tree has over 19,643. I researched other genealogy software and the results were still the same, none of them would handle a file as large as the one that I had. I searched the web and found a small tool to download and purchase that would build the pages for me. It is called Ged4web and can be found at http://www.ged4web.com/. You can modify the look of your website, including background images and text. It takes about 3 minutes to generate all of the thousands of pages that reside on my web site, http://catrackgraphics.com
Using the tools in Macromedia’s Dreamweaver I created Photo albums of ancestors and headstones and included the link to the albums on the main page created by the ged4web program. Modifying the album pages to look like the ones generated by ged4web took a little bit of time, and being a designer I am a bit picky about the way they look.
Updating the website is as easy as rerunning the ged4web application against a newly generated gedcom file and uploading it to the server.