FYI--
-----Original Message-----
From: state-coord-bounces(a)rootsweb.com
[mailto:state-coord-bounces@rootsweb.com] On Behalf Of Tina S. Vickery
Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2008 6:24 PM
To: state-coord(a)rootsweb.com; usgenweb-all(a)rootsweb.com;
usgenweb-discuss(a)rootsweb.com; board(a)rootsweb.com
Subject: [STATE-COORD] Rootsweb Announcement.
Please forward to all Project lists.
Tina Vickery
National Coordinator
USGenWeb Project
____
RootsWeb Announcement
As you know, The Generations Network has hosted and funded the RootsWeb
online community since June 2000, thereby maintaining RootsWeb as the
world's oldest and largest free genealogy website. TGN remains committed
to this mission and believes that RootsWeb is an absolutely invaluable
and complementary resource to
Ancestry.com, our flagship commercial
family history site. We believe in both services and want to see both
communities prosper and grow.
As part of this goal, we have decided to "transplant"
RootsWeb onto the
Ancestry.com domain beginning next week.
This move will not change the RootsWeb experience or alter the ease of
navigation to or within RootsWeb. RootsWeb will remain a free online
experience. What will be different is that the Web address for all
RootsWeb pages will change from
www.rootsweb.com to
www.rootsweb.ancestry.com. Again, the RootsWeb experience is not
changing.
The decision to host RootsWeb on
Ancestry.com is being made for one
primary reason: we believe that the users of each of our two main
websites can be better served if they have access to the best services
available on both. Simply stated, we want to introduce more
Ancestry.com
users to RootsWeb and vice versa.
Today, despite the fact that
Ancestry.com and
RootsWeb.com are the two
most frequently visited family history sites on the Web, only 25 percent
of visitors to
Ancestry.com visited RootsWeb in January 2008, while only
20 percent of visitors to RootsWeb visited
Ancestry.com (according to
Comscore Media Metrix). We think we will serve our users best by doing a
better job of letting them know what is available on both
Ancestry.com
and RootsWeb. Hosting RootsWeb on
Ancestry.com is the first step towards
making this happen, but we will absolutely look for more and better ways
down the road to advance this goal.
Hosting RootsWeb on
Ancestry.com will also make it easier for us to make
changes and improvements to the RootsWeb experience in the future.
All old RootsWeb URLs will continue to work, whether they are bookmarks
or favorites, links to or from a hosted page or URLs manually typed in
your Internet browser. We will have a redirect in place so that all old
URLs will automatically end up on the appropriate new RootsWeb URL.
You will never need to update your old favorites or links unless you
want to. We have worked to make the transition as seamless as possible
for our users, and this change should have a minimal impact on your
experience with the site.
RootsWeb will remain a free online experience dedicated to providing you
with a place where our community can find their roots together. If you
have questions regarding this change please email them to
feedback(a)rootsweb.com.
Thanks,
Tim Sullivan
CEO
The Generations Network, Inc.