New Domain for RootsWeb Sites

Oh bother... does this mean that all of the urls within websites pointing to other rootsweb sites will have to be changed as well? What a bunch of crud!

From the mailing lists at RootsWeb!

Please forward to all Project lists.

Tina Vickery
National Coordinator
USGenWeb Project

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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@rootsweb.com.

Thanks,

Tim Sullivan
CEO
The Generations Network, Inc.