Saturday, July 5, 2008

New Homepage for Ancestry

On July 2 Ancestry launched a brand-new homepage that logged-in members will see the next time they visit the site. Their goal is to combine the best of the old homepage with all of the personalized features and tools formerly in the MyAncestry tab. Hopefully the result is quick, central access to the resources each member searches most. Here's the scoop direct from Ancestry:

Family Tree Access – Surveys and site analysis told us that the 5 million Ancestry members building their family trees on Ancestry.com want quick access to their trees (particularly the pedigree view). We updated the homepage’s link to the family tree, added thumbnails of images uploaded to the trees, and included summaries and quick access-points to the tree. Multiple family trees can be viewed from the “My Trees” link.

Quick Links – In the “My Quick Links” section, members can add personalized Web links to any page on Ancestry.com – or to any page anywhere on the Internet. This allows quick, instant access to resources each researcher uses most frequently: message boards, census records, or specific collections and databases.

What’s New – Surveys also showed that Ancestry researchers want information on new records and features added to the site. We created the new “What’s Happening at Ancestry” section to meet this need. The “New records on Ancestry.com” list is dynamically updated every time new records are added to Ancestry.com. ·

Organize Research – To help members keep their research organized, we also added the Shoebox, Recent Activity, and a new To-Do list to the new homepage. Combining the old homepage and the MyAncestry page into a single page reduces the number of clicks it takes researchers to access the features they use most. As part of this combination, there is no longer a separate “My Ancestry” tab. All of the tools and features from the My Ancestry page are now on the new homepage. "

You can learn more about the new homepage at www.ancestry.com/home/lihp/faq.aspx, as well as leave feedback, thoughts and ideas on the new homepage.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Ancestry messed up yet again! The "NEW" homepage and other "NEW" pages are awful. WHY can't they leave a good thing alone? They messed up FTM with 2008, now they're doing the same thing to Ancestry.com! If some other company had all the censuses, I'd leave Ancestry fast.
Chloe