Publish on the Web

Second Site transforms your genealogy data into web pages. To share those pages with the world, you have to copy them to a public access web server. If you want to share a site with a smaller audience, you might consider publishing the site to a password-protected folder on a web server. You can also distribute your site via a DVD or flash drive.

1. Find Space on the Web

Family History Hosting (FHH) is a web hosting service that is dedicated to genealogy sites and has special features for Second Site users.

There are many other web hosting options. Your ISP may provide a home page you can use for this purpose, or you may use free web hosting services. Most of the free options add advertising or other content to your pages, and in some cases the extra content can interfere with the formatting of your site.

For more information about web hosting services, registering a domain, and other topics, see the Resources page.

When people browse your pages, they won't be accessing the files on your own computer, they will be using the copies stored on the public access web server.

2. Copy the Pages

Second Site stores all the files that you need to copy in the Output (-o) folder. Second Site names the Output folder by adding "-o" to the same name of the SDF file. Most sites also include subfolders in the -o folder; you should also copy those subfolders and the files they contain to the web server.

(See the Folders page for more information about Second Site folders.)

How do you copy files to a web server? That depends.

For Family History Hosting (FHH) customers, Second Site includes a Family History Hosting > Publish command that automates the process of updating the published version of your site on the FHH server.

For other web hosting services, you use FTP software to transfer files. You'll need a piece of software called an FTP Client to use FTP to transfer the files. Check the Other Resources page for links to sites that offer FTP clients.

My Family History Hosting service also supports FTP. If you are an FHH customer, copy your site contents to the www folder on the server.

If your ISP or web space provider does not support FTP access, you will have to contact them to find out what method they recommend.