What’s New in The Family History Guide: Top 20
On Wednesday, March 21, 2018 we presented a BYU Webinar that recapped 20 important changes that have taken place in The Family History Guide website over the last few months. We’re excited about the recent updates, and we hope they will help you be even more productive with using the website.
The changes to the website are listed in order from left to right as you move across the menus in The Family History Guide. For each item below, menu paths are listed in parentheses.
- Top menus (all pages) – There is now one row for the menu items instead of two. Shading is added, and the logo is smaller to save space.
- Mobile-friendly (all pages) – For tablets and phones, the top menu is replaced by the “hamburger” icon. When clicked, it opens a left-hand menu for navigation. On desktops, the hamburger icon is also used when the window is made narrower than the top menu. Additional mobile-friendly code changes were made.
- Video tiles (Home page) – The tiles next to each category on the Home page now link to short videos on the YouTube Channel.
- Donations (all pages, footers) – The footer area lists larger donations, such as the Larry H. Miller Foundation, and others to come.
- New brochures (Intro > Media) – Seven full-page color brochures, on a variety of topics, replace the previous single brochure. Brochures may be downloaded and printed, but not re-posted. Brochures are no longer available for order from The Family History Guide.
- Quizzes (Train > Quizzes, and Project pages) – Interactive quizzes are available for several Projects in FamilySearch, Ancestry, MyHeritage, and Findmypast. These can be used by individual learners or by trainers who are coaching learners.
- Open/Close (all Project pages) – When a Choice is clicked, it hides the steps and content inside it. When clicked again, the steps and content are re-displayed. The Open All and Close All buttons in the Goal area can be used to hide content for all Choices in a Project, or re-display all of them.
- Partner Exercises (Partner Project pages) – About 150 Exercises were added to Partner pages (Ancestry, MyHeritage, and Findmypast).
- Activities Index (Activities pages) – The Activities Index is an alphabetical list of links for all activities found in the Activities pages.
- Activities Tracker (Activities pages) – The Activities Tracker helps you take notes on various Activities. Instead of measuring proficiencies like the Project Trackers, it allows you to rate how successful or effective a particular activity is for your family or group.
- Blog format (Media/Social > Blog) – Our Blog post page now features a convenient two-column view to help you see more entries.
- YouTube Channel (Media/Social > YouTube) – A number of videos have been added to our YouTube Channel, for general interest and for specific topics.
- Twitter (Media/Social > Twitter) – Our Twitter page keeps you up-to-date on the latest happenings with The Family History Guide.
- Pinterest (Media/Social > Pinterest) – Our Pinterest page contains quite a few useful Pinterest boards to help you organize and discover family history material.
- Inline QUIKLinks (Country and state pages) – QUIKLinks that were previously collected at the bottom of country and state pages are now distributed in Goals and Choices that feature them. For example, QUIKLinks for England births, marriages, and deaths are included in the Vital Records Goal on the England page.
- Australian States (Countries > Australia) – State pages have been added for New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, and Western Australia.
- Online Tracker (Tracker > Online) – Categories have been added for all Partner Projects and most of the Country pages.
- Vault menu (Vault) – The Vault menu now features more items in the drop-down list that tke you directly to sections of the Vault page.
- Features Help (Misc. > Features Help) – This is a list of helpful features in The Family History Guide, along with instructions and tips for using them.
- Computer Basics (Intro > Computer Basics, in progress) – The Computer Basics section is being redesigned to follow the Projects/Goals/Choices model. It is expected to be updated on the site soon.
Those of us who help Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking patrons at the FamilySearch Center were beginning to refer patrons to your website. When do you think the world-languages versions might be ready?
Hi Juan – we use Google Translate for language versions, as doing human translations for the site would be very expensive with the large amount of frequently changing content we have. For more info on language capabilities in The Family History Guide, see https://www.thefhguide.com/features.html#lan and https://www.thefhguide.com/lang.html
Thanks!
Just wow!!!!!!!! The Family History Guide just keeps getting better!
Bob, seeing all this hard work in one place is just outstanding. Thank you for all your efforts to make the world of family history for our users worldwide is so much better. I wish every person that trains and teaches others would use the Family History Guide’s methods. It would unify staff members in every Family History Center and Library and create independent learners all over the world. It would help all the big genealogy companies get more users and people would just move forward so much faster. The Family History Guide has taken a big portion of the frustration people have experienced in the past and laid it to rest. It just doesn’t get any better than this…except when you are inspired to update the wealth of what is already there for us all. Thank you just doesn’t seem adequate!