1 reply to this topic

[Barry Taylor]

Idea: List, highlight or flag unsolved problems or special needs and incorporate that list into the RM Create a Website functionality.

All of us have persistent unsolved puzzles in our family trees. These special (and usually nagging) needs may involve a missing date, a missing family member or perhaps a craving for an individual's photo.

Currently, surfers who visit our published RM family history webs have no way of knowing how much we desperately wish for such missing items. These individuals might have the very answer, information or photo that we want, yet they will surf right on by without realizing that they could have helped in a big way.

My suggesting is to offer an optional Help me! page where we could list our top ten problems or needs. I've grown such a page manually using html and added its link to my table of contents. When I first published this page I thought it may be a total waste of time, but I was pleasantly surprised when I got positive results on one of the five items within a few weeks of its being published.

To keep the link intuitive I've titled my page and menu link Challenges - Help me solve these family history puzzles! I received reassurance that the idea was not totally wonky when I discovered this very feature mentioned in another software program. There it's titled Most Wanted.

I suppose that an alternative to a near-to-the-home-page solution would be row / cell highlighting or (shudder) a pop-up within the applicable page, be it family group sheet or narrative page. The problem is that search engines like Google do not scan every page in one's web. Linking the Can you help? page to the home page ensures that search engine crawlers are likely to find and index it.

I've tested a search for each of my Help me! items using Google, and without exception they appear at or near the top of the search results.

Forgive me if this suggested enhancement has already been tabled. I did a quick search of the forum and could not find a similar item presented for inclusion.

Barry Taylor
Sooke, British Columbia, Canada

[Renee Zamora]

Confirming enhancement request is in our tracking system.