Monday, March 29th, 2010 at 8:10 am by Jason Simanek

In the past I have always been careful to whom I recommended Gramps. The program is excellent but the wiki-based website was not very good for attracting more ordinary users. I’ve tried telling some of those ordinary users about the excellent genealogical program that I was contributing to, but the moment they saw the site their enthusiasm was greatly diminished.

The primary wiki-based website worked well for documentation, but for introductory purposes it left a lot to be desired. I always felt that the wiki’s start page was like a 747 dashboard: lots of little details that all seem to be of about the same importance and completely incomprehensible without some in-depth consideration. As a designer I knew that in order to catch and retain the interest of new users the site would need to focus on what the new user needed to know and it needed to look good doing it.

Not to toot my own design horn, but I think this new site is a good effort at meeting that need:

Gramps Wiki-based Homepage

Gramps Homepage 2010

I hope you all agree. I’m sure we’ll be working on improving it further as we approach Gramps’ 10-year anniversary.

What’s that? Yeah, 10 years! Part of getting this new site up and running correctly involved me going through a large portion of past blog posts (I started this new WordPress site with a copy of the existing Blog database) to recategorize them. In the process I discovered a long history of Gramps milestones. It was a good read. But one post in particular was very interesting and previously unknown to me: Looking Back Over 5 Years by Don Allingham. Please take some time to read that if you haven’t already. It really opened my eyes to how remarkable Gramps’ current state is.

Oh, and I also found a few other past posts announcing new websites. ;D

Onward! Upward!