Your Own Personal Website
A family website is a website that's dedicated to your family, try Easysite to create a family website for your family. It serves as a connecting point for your family and friends. It's a place to safely share the latest news, pictures, video clips, family bios, blog entries, calendar events, etc. It's also interactive and easily updatable. Family and friends can interact with your family website by posting to the message board, signing a guestbook page, meeting in a chat room or commenting on items that have already been posted.
A Easy Way To Stay Connected
A family website can be a great way to stay connected and keep in touch with friends and family no matter where they live. We all have friends and family that live out of state or even out of the country. A family website can help maintain the connections you have with friends and family by sharing the special moments of your life. A family website can also act as a catalyst for getting reacquainted with old friends or even distant family members. Having a family website is an easy and fun way to share your life with friends and family no matter where they live.
A Safe, Secure and Private Website
Family websites should be safe, secure and private. It should provide a way to share pictures and other information while maintaining the level of privacy that you're comfortable with. Specifically, you should be able to "lock-up" your family website pages so only you and your family website members have access to your family website. This is important. Unlike social networking sites where everything is posted to a public forum, a family website should provide security features so only the people you want to, can access your family website.

You should be able to control who has access to your personal site and what they can access. Having these types of privacy features provides a safe and secure website service that is unmatched by other types of website building services.
A Fun Way to Share Photos
Posting pictures is a key feature of any family website service. Every family website service should allow you to upload pictures either one at a time or upload multiple pictures at the same time (also known as "batch uploading" pictures.) Once your pictures are up, they are immediately viewable to your friends and family that have access to your site.

Some website building services allow you to edit your picture right within the site without using external photo-editing software. Editing features may include brightness, contrast, cropping, rotating, color correction, red-eye reduction and even photo effects all within the site.

Many family website services let you order prints of your pictures directly from the site. This makes it easy for family members to get their own prints, especially if they weren't the ones that took the pictures. Some services will even let you order photo merchandise such as a shirt or mug with a picture on it. Some even let you order custom photo greeting cards. Some services will also let you purchase an archive disc that contains all the pictures and other items that have been posted to your site.

Family websites should also allow you to organize your pictures into albums. Albums will let you group pictures and organize them by the type of event.

Other types of photo features include: slide shows, custom borders and frames for pictures, captions or voice captions (let you record yourself talking about your pictures), the ability to assign a picture as the background of your site and the ability to let visitors comment on pictures.
An Online Scrapbook
If you are into scrapbooking then you'll probably love maintaining your own family website. Everyone loves to look over a finished scrapbook, but a scrapbook isn't that easy to share especially with friends and family that live far away. Creating your own family website is like having your own online scrapbook that friends and family can visit at any time.
A Special Place for Memories
A family website is a great place for family memories. Special pages can be created and dedicated to special family event or family history. Older photos can be scanned in and posted. Important journal entries can be posted as well for posterity.
A Safe Place to Keep Photos and Videos
A family website can act as a backup for important family memories. Hopefully nothing will happen to your home or photo albums, but what if something did? If you maintain a family website, you have peace of mind knowing that your family photos, journal entries, video clips and other memories are backed up onto the web and stored in a safe location.


An Ad-Free Website
Your family website should not have any ads on it. If it does, you might want to consider using a different service. Ads can distract your site members and visitors from your site. Ads can also be offensive and not appropriate to the viewer. A family website should be a safe and fun experience for the whole family. For this reason, you should select a family website service that you can feel safe about even when children visit your site.
Start For Free
Most family website services will let you try their service out for free. This allows a potential customer to get a feel for how easy and user friendly the website service is, before they have to commit to buying. A family website service should believe in their service enough to allow people to try it out for free and without obligation.
Fun, Simple and Easy
Having and maintaining a family website should be a fun and easy thing to do. Let's face it, if you're family website is a headache to maintain or if it takes to much time then you're not going to use it. Life is very fast paced, especially for parents with young children. You don't have time to learn how to use a difficult website. A family website should be able to be updated within minutes.
Free Telephone Support
We all get stuck and can use a little help from time to time. Make sure your family website service offers free telephone support. If they don't, you might want to look elsewhere. Free friendly telephone support can make the difference between a frustrating experience and a fun one.
Member and Followers
A family website should let you have "members" on your site. Members should be able to log into your site, access pages that are locked-up (set to member-only access), post items and receive site notifications. A member is different from a visitor to your site because of these things. If your site is open for visitors then visitors can see pages of your site, but they can't post items to your site, while members can. For example, if you wanted your sister to be able to post some pictures onto your site, you would create a membership login for her.

As the site administrator, you should be able to assign what each member is able to do on your site.

In addition to manually creating members, some family websites will let visitors request a membership to your website. This feature is useful if you have a large family or a lot of people who will need to become members of your site.

A "follower" of your website is someone who doesn't need to login or post items to your site. They just want to be notified after your site has been updated. For instance, after you have posted new picture to your family site, followers will receive a notification email letting them know they're up.
Photo Editing
Some family websites let you edit your photos right within the site without the use of external software. For example, correcting color, brightening, making pictures black and white, correcting red-eye, rotating, zooming, cropping and more can all be done within some of the better family websites.
Customize the Look
You should be able to assign a "look" to your family website. For example, when a birthday comes around, you can select a birthday look or theme for your site. A wedding, select a wedding look. Holidays, select a holiday look such as Christmas, Valentines Day or Halloween. Maybe your site will change with the seasons. Whatever look you select should best fit your family's personality or a special event that just took place. Whatever the reason, make sure the look of your website can be switched whenever you want. Also make sure there are plenty of looks or themes to choose from. Some sites will even let you set a picture that you have uploaded to be the background of your site.
Ability To Use Your Own Domain Name
Higher-end family websites will let you hook-up your own domain name to your website. A domain name is a dot-com name. This lets people access your website in a more direct way. For example you might start out your family website using the web-address that is initially assigned to you, Family-Website.com/Your-Site-Name. Using a domain, you can access the same site from just Your-Domain-Name.com, etc.
Home Page
Your family website's home page should automatically be updated with the latest news, information, pictures and calendar events. This should take place automatically. For example after you have posted a birthday to your calendar page, your home page should automatically display the birthday when it's coming up.
Message Board
Part of the fun of having your own family website is interacting with people using the message board. A message board provides a way to carry on a conversation over time and include everyone's input.
Shared Calendar With Reminders
Family websites usually have a calendar page. This page let's you post important upcoming events, birthdays, anniversaries, etc. A shared calendar is one that everyone can refer to online. It keeps your family in sync. Some services will even send out optional reminder emails from your calendar page.
Family Bios
A family bio page is a list of all the family members. This is where members write about themselves and includes important information, such as their favorite movies, TV shows, books, contact information and even what gifts they would like. You can also post a picture of yourself on a bio or profile page.
Favorite Links
A links page is simply a list of links or favorite sites that you feel the rest of your friends and family might enjoy visiting. Maybe you found a great site that has deals on shoes or a web page with a funny video. You can use the links page to share this with friends and family.
File Uploads
Family websites should allow you to upload files to your site. Maybe you have an important document, spread sheet or PowerPoint file that you want to share or keep online as a backup. The files page is the place for that.
Videos
Everyone has video clips and family home videos just sitting on a camcorder. With a family website, you can now easily post your favorite clips online to share with friends and family. A good family website will make the task of posting videos a simple and fun process. Some website building services will also let you "capture" video directly to your personal website. When you capture a video, the video goes directly from your video camera up to your website. This eliminates the need to learn how to use complicated video editing software.
Audio
Some family websites will let you upload audio to your family website. This is a great feature that lets you share your favorites.
Background Music
There are few family websites that will let you assign a song that you've uploaded to play in the background while people are visiting your site, background music. This can be useful to set the mood for your site when people come to visit.
Free Pages
Free pages or custom pages can be thought of as blank sheets of paper similar to a Word doc. These let you easily add text and pictures. The point of free pages is that no service has every type of page for every occasion. When you utilize a free page you can create any type of page that you want. For example you might want to create a "contact us" page or a special announcement page or a page to replace the prebuilt home page, etc.
Surveys
Survey pages let your family members give their input by filling out a survey and submitting it to your site. The site totals the survey answers and displays results. So now you don't have to guess what people would like to do for the next family vacation or wonder what everyone would like to eat at the next family get together.
Email Form
An email form page let you create a questionnaire on your site. This let's visitors answer a set of question and submit it to you. Once they submit their answers, you are sent an email with this information.
Email Blast
An email blast page lets you send an email out to all of your site members and followers. When you want to communicate to everyone at the same time, you use the email blast page. You might use this after you have posted some important news to your site or when you want to invite everyone to join you in your site's chatroom.

A Family Reunion Website

A family reunion website can be a great extension for a family. Before a family reunion, a family website can be a great tool to get the family reunion organized. For example, family members can use the message board to work out the details of where to meet and what's going to happen. Using the survey page is a great way to get every family member's input while planning the family reunion. After the family reunion, creating a family website is a great place to post pictures and videos from the family reunion. Also, family members can use the family website to stay connected and in touch no matter how far away they live.

A Baby Website

A family website may be a great way to introduce a new addition to the family. Every proud parent takes a lot of pictures when their baby arrives. When you utilize a family website after the baby arrives, you have the perfect way to show off your new bundle of joy. Posting pictures of your baby to a family website is a great way to distribute pictures. Or you could build a baby website using Easysite. After pictures are posted you don't have to worry about getting prints to everyone. They can order prints directly off of your family website.

A Wedding Website

A family website can also be used to help with a wedding celebration. When you're getting ready to walk down the aisle, don't forget you can create a wedding website with Easysite. When you have a wedding website you can work out a lot of details before the big day. Posting directions to the service, registry information, new address, wedding details can all be posted to your wedding website. After the wedding you can use your family website to post pictures and videos. Having an online guestbook is a great place for everyone to say "hi". (Of course your wedding website should be able to be converted into a baby website not long after the honeymoon is over.)

A Group Website

Creating a youth group website service can also help groups stay organized and connected. Learnin how to make a boy scouts website ,girl scouts website, youth groups website, sports teams website and clubs can all use a website to facilitate their group's activities and scheduled events. Posting a team's roster using a family website can help a team stay organized. Team pictures can be posted so people can access and print their favorite photos. Use the calendar page of a family website to keep track of games and special events.

A Small Business Website

Surprisingly, most family website services are flexible enough to be used as a small business website using a small business website builder to build their business site. The same features, pages and interactivity that go into making a family website can be utilized for a small business site. In fact, many small businesses opt to use a family website type services to create their own websites. A couple of reasons for this are the flexibility and affordability.

Small business owners need to be able to update their own small business websites when they want to and as often as they want to. When a small business owner utilizes a family website service, they are now able to do their own updates to their site. No more paying a high-priced web designer or waiting on them to get the work done.

Small business owners also appreciate the affordability of a family website service. Times are tough and every dollar counts. When small business owners use a family website service, they are building their own turn-key small business website within a system. Because all of the back-end programming has already been done, the small business owner is saving a lot of money by building their own website. Even people that aren't tech-savvy or computer literate can utilize a family website service to build a small business website.

Creating an online store is a very simple process with a business website builder like Easysite. Within minutes, anyone who can use a mouse can build their own online store page complete with shopping cart, check out and credit card processing. The type of service really does take all the work out of creating an online store page. In fact, many people find this to be an easy and fun process.

A Musician's Website

So you have recorded your own album or you're in to process of doing so. Now what? You might want to consider using Easysite to create a music website. Many services are flexible enough to handle this. The type of service that you need is one that will let you post music clips to your site, assign background music and set up your own store page to sell your album directly off the site.

A Photography Website

Many family website services are advanced enough to be used as a Photography Website or Professional Business Photography Website. The main purpose of a photography website is to display pictures to clients and to let clients order prints through the site.

A typical photography website will have contact information for the photographer, instructions for a shoot, rates for services, a portfolio of pictures and a client viewing area. These sites will let you set your own prices and make money on orders place through the website.

Another important feature of a high-quality photography website is the ability to assign access codes to albums. An access code (or password) lets a client access their pictures while keeping visitors from doing so.

You may also want to let your clients "rate" their pictures. This is a way for your clients to select their favorite pictures and also a way to select which pictures they don't like. After a client has rated their pictures you can filter the pictures to only display the ones they like.

Watermarking picture is important for photographers. A watermark is a label that is lightly printed on the displaying pictures. This protects your pictures from being copied or used without your consent.

When you create your own photography website you should be able to view reports of all the orders that have come through your site. You should also receive an email each time an order is placed.

Most photography sites should give you the option to self-fulfill your orders. If you have a favorite photo lab that you work with or if you do your own printing, this is an option that you want to select. Basically, instead of the website fulfilling your print order, you are responsible to do so.

The last feature that is important to look for in a photography website service is the ability to generate contact sheets. Contact sheet are pages of thumbnails of the pictures. These let you and your clients reference, build orders and compare pictures from a printed page. You should be able to create contact sheets based on your clients' ratings. Also contact sheets should be able to be generated with watermarks, source file name and your contact information.

Conclusion

A family website is a fun way to stay connected and keep in touch with friends and family. Having your own family website makes it easy to share news, pictures, videos, calendar events, blog entries and more with friends and family. A family website should be simple and easy to use. A family website service should offer privacy features to keep your site safe and secure.

Beyond the basic features, many family website services offer a wide range of features and services on how to make a website. Some services are advanced and flexible enough to build just about any type of website imaginable. These types of small business website builders can be used to create a church website, make a sports team website,build a music websiteand build a classroom website in less than an hour.