Home sweet home pages

By SHELLEY HOWELLS

It's a sitcom staple: enthusiastic family share (read: impose) holiday/baby snaps and lengthy anecdotes with long-suffering friends and relatives.

Now, thanks to the web, families are sharing (or inflicting, depending on your point of view) their lives, holidays, children, renovations, pets - you name it - with the entire darn planet via family home pages.

You do not need to be a geek to create a family website, thanks to free hosting sites such as www.familymoment.com, www.myfamily.com and www.familybuzz.com.

These sites allow people to upload and display photos and family news, then invite friends and rellies to view from the comfort of their own PCs, be it in the next room or next continent.

Sites may be password-protected to allow entry to a chosen few. Other features can include file sharing, space for a family tree, recipes and a chatroom where folk can get together to have an online laugh at the latest photos and news.

Most have a calendar on which you can note birthdays and the like, so nobody has an excuse to forget.

Such free sites are a good place to start, but have limited capacity and you will soon run out of space if you get hooked.

Most family website creators we spoke to had two reasons for building their sites: to keep in touch with widely dispersed friends and family; and to simply "have a go" at web-page design starting with a subject they know best: themselves.

Auckland's Claire Hurman, as you would expect from a woman in the web-design business, has a stylish site that is a "blog"/family website hybrid.

Her family are spread across New Zealand, Canada and England and she uses the site to keep in touch via digital photo albums that date back to 1997, a webcam and a journal about her day-to-day life.

The webcam has been a great family-bonding tool.

"One Christmas, it broadcast photos all through the day on my website," she says.

"Family members from around the world logged on at various times to watch us opening presents and eating Christmas lunch."

Another fancy site Meteorite is a monster labour of love by Wellington IBM sales rep Andrew Spurgeon.

"I made the site to keep distant family up-to-date with pictures, movies and sound," he says.

"It has turned into something a bit bigger than I imagined and I've now got over 4000 images online. The site runs a database of images, streaming audio and video, and a live webcam, together with a mail postcard system."

To get all this he has a home-based server, used Dreamweaver and Photoshop software, a huge amount of time and Zyan, an application that helps to manage content and page layout. Zyan was created by a friend looking for a way to host his own family pictures, and has now taken on a life of its own.

But no matter how many bells and whistles there are, the main point of the site, says Andrew, is to "tell the world how much we love our kids".

Children are the main feature on Russell and Frances Hutchinson's site. Very soon after the birth of their two children, photos of the newborns were online.

"It's great because our families are far-flung, with relatives in Japan and across the UK," says Russell.

"It's a really good way to keep people up-to-date with family matters.

"Our site is a talking point in the family. We wouldn't always send lots of photos in the post, but snaps quickly go on the website."

Alan Thomson and family have moved from Auckland to Skipton, in North Yorkshire.

"I use websites to show the folks in New Zealand the latest family shots," he says. "And my two boys have put some cartoon graphics on a page for showing their schoolfriends."

There are also music files and a video sequence, so it is no surprise that he ran out of space. But instead of updating his home page, he regularly changes the display on more basic free photo-only sites (such as athomson.netfirms.com/index.htm).

John Van Der Leden points out that keeping family memories online not only makes the pictures more widely available than the huge books gathering dust on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, "but it's also a great way to secure your photos if the house burned down".

Heather built her family site to put to use some computer courses she had done at the local community centre, and she has gone on to build other sites.

"My friends and family find it funny and go to the site often," she says.

"Overseas family keep in touch via email on the site and get to see up-to-date photos of us."

Her children, pets and even her divorce certificate have their own pages.

"It's a fun site with lots of sounds and pictures," she says.

The site owners we spoke to had a few privacy concerns. Andrew Spurgeon says some content of his site is password-protected and, because he hosts the site from home via a Paradise cable modem, he uses a Linux-based firewall.

No matter how people go about setting up their sites and how much or little they put on them, they all agree that the best thing about doing it is the response from people who have a look.

Russell Hutchinson: "Many more people - friends and acquaintances - end up seeing the website than we would normally show family photos to.

"Having a little window on our life open to them has made relationships with people generally closer."

Family Moment

My Family

Family Buzz

Claire Hurman site

Meteorite

Zyan

Russell and Frances Hutchinson

Alan Thomson and family

John Van Der Leden

Heather Adams