1997: The website was originally established on AOL member pages.  It was a simple 6 page web with a solid color background. It was created using AOL's easy online website creator, which had limited options. This is pretty much what everyone's personal page looked like back then (some color/font differences), probably because we all used very limited tools. 

My focus was originally on family tree research, but it turns out that Baril is a very common French-Canadian name with no connections to us, so I ended up expanding my focus to Vladimirets.   

1998 - 2001: The website remained on AOL Member pages until we outgrew it.  This image shows how the index page looked in 2001. The background was called "fuzzy leaf", which I thought was appropriate for a genealogy website.  The website was created using FrontPage 95, and my learning curve taught my kids a lot of really bad words.  It wasn't a fun program to do web development on, but it was the only full-featured non-commercial option at the time.

I started to really focus on content at this point.  The mailing list was established, and the content expanded to include another chapter of the Sefer Vladimirets, as well as its table of contents, the yiskor list, and the map.  The photo album was stocked with images from the Sefer Vladimirets as well as all the old photos I had in my possession.  When we had about 200 photos online and 15-20 total web pages, we exceeded the amount of free space AOL could offer.

2001 - 2007:  When we outgrew the AOL member pages and moved the site to RootsWeb.com, I took the opportunity to redesign the site.  Version 3 was a cleaner, more modern look, with easier to read fonts and a textured sidebar that was taken from an illustrated Haggadah in the 16th Century. Thanks to a computer crash, it took almost a year to update the site and get it uploaded. Three versions of FrontPage have been used to create this site: FP98, FP2000 and FP2002.  Having gotten used to it, I don't cuss at it quite as much.  Adobe Photoshop was also used for cropping some of the images.

Although these images show the site in late 2007, after several reorganizations, you can clearly see that there is a lot more content.  The website took on a life of its own as other researchers helped me with translations, immigration research and photographs.  I also made a trip to visit my mother and my aunt to scan old photos that they had.  This filled out a lot of the 1930's-1960's photo pages. 

During this time we hit some major milestones: over 1,000 images, over 120 pages, over 100 people on the mailing list, the halfway mark for translating the Sefer Vladimirets, and some recognition from others on the quality of content and presentation shown by our website. 

One milestone is of particular interest to me - as of 2003/2004, when you did a search, we finally outranked the Vladimirets tractor.  Now, our site or associated links come up first in the list.  For decades, the Vladimirets tractor was the best-selling Soviet-era tractor, and it still has quite a fan club.  Large numbers of websites are devoted to it, and there are literally tens of thousands of photographs of various specimens across the internet.  It was quite an accomplishment to finally outrank the tractor.

2008-  The site is still hosted by Rootsweb.com, since they allow unlimited space for genealogy websites.  It seems every 5 years or so, the website expands enough to require a redesign.  I also take the opportunity to clean up the back end, since I don't know who will take over for me eventually. Version 4 of this website is fully compatible with the new web standards (Web 2.0), which should make it easier over time.

In addition to updating the look in 2008, we have added more interactivity to the site:  audio & video archives, interactive street maps of Vladimirets, searchable web galleries, multimedia exhibits highlighting information that would otherwise be buried too deeply for people to find.

Programs used to create or maintain version 4.0:

Personal Ancestral File -- for Family Tree database entry & GEDCOM creation.  Not fancy, but you can change the entry template and I get tired of christian templates with christenings and baptisms, but no B'nei Mitzvahs.

RootsMagic -- to publish the Family Tree

Microsoft Expressions Web -- replaced FrontPage for website design and maintenance.

Shozam -- web gallery program for the photo album, maps, slideshows and some of the exhibits.

Other backend programs were used to create or edit content, such as Adobe Photoshop, SoundForge, DePopper, Daktek, Flash, and others. 

Some tasks, such as digitizing audio and video from obsolete formats was outsourced, as was some advanced programming and graphics work.

2009 -

The site is now hosted on a paid server host, with a "mirror site" hosted at rootsweb.com.  When the photo albums were upgraded to web galleries, rootsweb couldn't handle them.

Creation of the "Vladimirets Landsleit Connection" through Facebook.com, for those who are more interested in connecting with current cousins than the past.  

2010 -

While not a design change, we achieved some major milestones this year:

Completion of the yizkor book translation into English. Addition of scanned chapters of the yizkor book so that the entire book is preserved.

Addition of multiple family trees to the database, so that Vladimirets descendants can more easily connect and see how the families intertwine. And back by popular demand are the graphic family trees, although we cannot show the entire database in a single tree, only descendants of a specific individual. PAF Companion 5.2 enabled us to provide these trees in pdf format.

2011 -

We are now using The Next Generation (TNG) genealogy software for our database, to allow for collaborative work on the family tree.  TNG also has some new features, including a relationship calculator, multiple view styles and the ability to import/export sections of the tree.  For security purposes, we can also parse the tree to allow a user to contribute or edit only their branch of the tree.  This should eliminate conflicting information, as people argue it out amongst themselves.

We are also shifting the photo albums to this software package, so users can upload their own photos to the albums.  As we expand use of TNG, users will be able to upload multimedia as well.