The Federation of Genealogical Societies is holding an annual conference this week in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The Federation took this opportunity to announce that its new web site launched today. http://www.fgs.org has an all-new look and feel, along with some new information.
The newly-revamped site now features a "clean looking" menu down the left side of the page. Clicking on most any of the items there results in the appearance of a new "sub-menu" that lists second-level information available. This results in almost any page on the site being available within two mouseclicks.
Access to the "Members Only" section requires a passcode. Members can find their passcode in the Delegate Digest.
This is a nice looking site! You might want to look at http://www.fgs.org.
While I like the new look - and agree that is seems cleaner - there seem to be a few things missing.
There is no obvious link to the Society Hall pages - resulting in a hunt through the membership subpages to find a link. So - you have to know it's there in order to find it.
There is no "search this site" link and no site map - making it difficult to locate things that might not be obvious - like the society hall link - for example.
There is also no contact information page readily available - and the contact information on the bottom of the pages is in a very small font, which is easily missed - especially on the longer pages where that is off the bottom of the screen.
Also - at least one of the links don't work (maybe that is "don't work yet.") Clicking on th link for the Store" page - does nothing.
Hopefully they can work out the bugs and tweak it a bit and then it will be a nicer, more user friendly site.
Regards
Joan
Posted by: Joan M Lowry | August 17, 2007 at 06:55 PM
Do have to belong to a society to become a member of FGS? They don't have any FAQ which would be very helpful with some of the questions that I have.
Also, I too noticed that you could not got to the store on this site. I love to look at all genealogy products, dream and start my Christmas wish-list early.
Becky
Posted by: Becky Weber-Baldenegro | August 18, 2007 at 11:13 AM
When I view the site in Firefox on my Mac, none of the menus or headers show up. It works fine on Safari, however, so I know what it's supposed to look like. I remember having the same quirk occur with the old FGS site. I wonder if anyone else has this problem and knows how to fix it?
Posted by: Laura | August 21, 2007 at 08:06 AM
It displays almost identically for me on Firefox 2.0.0.6 and Safari 2.0.4.
Posted by: theKiwi | August 21, 2007 at 09:21 AM