How I Manage My Online Family History Websites
My Online family history research is hosted in two different places
http://www.billneil.co.uk/family/index.html
https://familycopy2025-12-04.billneil.org/
For the past few years I have been developing my online family history as a static HTML and CSS site. There are a number of reasons for this, but the main one is that HTML and CSS will never disappear. They have been designed to be backwardly compatible and do not require any dependencies to work. Essentially, I can put all the files that make up the online website in a local folder and anyone can run that site as long as they have a browser and just click on the index.html file in the folder. I believe this gives the site longevity. A further benefit of this development environment has been that I have had to learn the html and CSS from scratch myself which is very important no matter what technology you use to build a site. At the moment this site is hosted on my 1&1 Ionos hosting billneil.co.uk and can be found at http://www.billneil.co.uk/family/index.html . I keep local backups of this site as well as online ones.
The problem with this arrangement is that, as the site has grown and I have had to hive sections off into sub-pages, it has become very difficult to keep the navigation bars on all of the pages up to date so that I can move easily from page to page and test all the hyperlinks, anchors etc. As I develop the site, there are a lot of structural changes that need to be made to the site and this leads to complications.
I have had a couple of WordPress sites running for quite a few years now which I have used for recording my birdwatching activities and for other learning purposes. I set these up when I knew very little about HTML or CSS so they have only ever received a little bit of customisation. They have been basic but did the job. More recently with the development of the Gutenberg method in WordPress, which uses blocks to build web pages, I have felt that WordPress could be a helpful way to work up my family history web site. Of course it has the downside of needing to be maintained, both in the upkeep of themes and plugins but also in the PHP versions that change frequently. In the past I have had test blogs that have failed due to the lack of maintenance in these respects. It is also a content management system, so the pages are built “on the fly” making them less easy to read if the worst came to the worst – i.e. if you had to read the code rather than the rendered page.
I looked at a few WordPress videos and also looked at some videos on themes and page builders and came to the conclusion that the free version of Kadence Theme and Kadence Blocks would help me build the site from scratch with all the additions I wanted. I found good plugins to help me add custom CSS, backup and restore the site, and to organise the resources inside of the core WordPress technology.
As a result I have decided to develop the site as a WordPress site using the Kadence Theme and Kadence Blocks and when it is completely up to date and all the supporting pages and resources are finalised, then I will write it up as a static HTML and CSS site. This site is hosted on my Hostinger account billneil.org and can be found at https://familycopy2025-12-04.billneil.org/
At the moment I am working on my Neil family on the https://familycopy2025-12-04.billneil.org/ site and hope to have this complete by Christmas 2024. It is worth looking at this because it also has a blog with posts detailing the latest developments in my family research as well as having main pages on both Neils and Ramsays. It also contains some interesting recent discoveries regarding the early Neils that cannot be found at http://www.billneil.co.uk/family/index.html. However, this latter is more complete for the Ramsays and for later generations of Neils. I am hoping to work solely on my WordPress site https://familycopy2025-12-04.billneil.org/ for the immediate future. When I have all the Neil side up to date on that, I will copy the Ramsay stuff from the other site and after all that is complete, I will copy all the content of the WordPress site to my static HTML and CSS. Thereafter I think it will be easy to keep both running in parallel.