Websites & Family Tree CD/DVDs...

How to Create a Website or Family Tree CD/DVD

How to Create a Website

To create a website, you need to perform the following steps:

  1. Click Websites & Family Tree CD/DVDs on the Publish menu, to open the Websites & Family Tree CD/DVDs dialog.  This dialog shows you a list of packages that you have already created in the current project.  Each package represents a website or Family Tree CD/DVD (or both) that you are working on.  If you are just starting off, there won't be any packages.  Click New to create a new package.  Give it a memorable name and click  Create.  The package will be created, and the Website and Family Tree CD/DVD Wizard will be opened, to allow you to specify the contents of the website.  Follow the instructions in the wizard to create the website.  Click Help for more information if needed.  Don't worry about getting it right first time.  You will be able to view the results, and go back and change anything, as often as you like, until you get it right.  When you have specified everything you need, click  Finish on the last page of the wizard, and it will generate the files for your website for you.   You will be asked if you wish to view the content.  If you choose to do so, a web browser will open, allowing you to view your package contents.  What you are viewing looks exactly like a website.  The only difference is that it hasn't yet been put up on the Internet.  At this point, everything is still stored locally on your PC.
  2. The package you created in step 1 is stored within your current project.  Whenever you want to, you can revise it, or view it again.  To access it, open the Websites & Family Tree CD/DVDs dialog.  Your package should be listed there.  Select it and click Edit to revise it, or click Preview to view the contents again.  You can also click Rebuild to rebuild it at any time without revising it.  You might want to do this if, for example, you wanted to sure that your website reflects the latest changes you may have made to the data and records in your project.
  3. You can take as long as you like to get your website exactly the way you want it, and revise it as often as you like.  When you are satisfied that it is ready, the next step is to export it.  Up to now the package files have been stored within your project folder and managed for you by Family Historian.  The easiest and safest way to access them, is to copy them to a convenient location on your hard drive.  This is what happens when you click Export.  You will be asked if you wish to create a website or a Family Tree CD/DVD.   Clearly if you want to create a website, you should choose the former.  You will then be prompted to choose the required location to export to, and the files will be copied there.  The next step is to put your website on the Internet (see next).

How to Put Your Website on the Internet

To put your website up on the Internet, you need to copy your files to an appropriate location on a web server. A web server is a computer that is connected to the Internet, and which runs the necessary software to make your website work.

If you have access to the Internet, you will presumably already have an Internet Service Provider (I.S.P.). There is a good chance that your account with your I.S.P. includes free web space - that is, space on their web server for a website. If you are unsure, contact your I.S.P. and ask them. If they do support this, they will also be able to give you all the instructions you need for copying your website files to an appropriate location on their web server.

You will need to know the address (URL) of your web space, and you will almost certainly also need a user name and password to connect to it.

If your I.S.P. does not provide web space, you could either change to another one who does, or you might consider using a free website host. At time of writing, various companies provide free web space.

Transferring files to a server on the Internet is called uploading. To upload your files you will need a program called an FTP client (FTP stands for ‘File Transfer Protocol’). At time of writing, the program Filezilla is a free FTP client (see http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/). There are numerous other FTP client applications available for download from the Internet (mostly not free).

When you have your FTP client working, and have connected to your web space, you must copy all the website files to the web space using your FTP client.

Mention of any product or offer from any other company, here or elsewhere in Family Historian, does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation of any kind. If you decide to use any mentioned products, or try any mentioned offers (such as free web space), you do so entirely at your own risk. We do not take responsibility of any kind for any problems or issues you may have with any mentioned products or offers.

How to Create a Family Tree CD/DVD

Creating a Family Tree CD or DVD is exactly like creating a website.  Follow steps 1-3 above.  The only difference is that when it comes to step 3, and you click Export make sure that you choose the option for creating a Family Tree CD/DVD.  Why is it so similar?  This is because the contents of your CD or DVD will look like a website, and if you give the CD or DVD to someone, and they open it, Windows will automatically display the contents in their web browser.  The big advantage of doing this is that you do not need any web space, and there is no risk of anyone seeing the content that you would not wish to see it.

The reason you have to choose "Family Tree CD/DVD" when exporting in Step 3, is that Family Historian will add some additional files, to get the CD or DVD to automatically start, when the CD or DVD is put into a CD or DVD drive.

Of course, by the time you have completed these steps, you have created the content for your CD or DVD.  The next step is to burn this content to an actual CD or DVD (see next).

Burning CD/DVDs

When you have created the content for your Family Tree CD/DVD, the next step is to ‘burn’ it to one or more CDs or DVDs. The actual burning of a CD or DVD is beyond the scope of this help.  You will not use Family Historian for this.  But we can offer some pointers.

To burn a CD or DVD you need a DVD write or DVD rewriter. Any DVD writer or rewriter should hopefully also burn CDs.  It will almost certainly have come with burning software that will do everything you need. When you use this software, you may be asked what kind of CD/DVD you want to create, e.g. data or audio. If asked, you want to create a data CD or DVD - one that is suitable for distribution to other computers.

In the unlikely event that you have a DVD writer or rewriter but it did not come with software for burning a CD or DVD, you should be able to do it anyway.  Every version of Windows since Vista has the capability built in.

When you use software to burn a CD or DVD, you will have to specify which files are to be copied to the CD or DVD. These are the files you exported in Step 3 above.  If you have done everything correctly, the CD/DVD will have the following files only in its ‘root’ folder:

It will also have a folder called ‘data’ which will contain numerous other files.