A Dutch website containing over 30.000 records of genealogical information: www.familieberichtenarchief.nl
Opportunity
The NFBA website contains over 30.000 records of genealogical information in the Netherlands. The website needed an update as it had critical issues with the usaiblity and navication and with the pages’ responsetime.
Result
The new website has a clean and simple design, focussing on the search experience of the user. Moreover, the response time increased tremendously with the custom database queries that I implemented.
The NFBA website contains over 30.000 records of genealogical information in the Netherlands. The website needed an update as it had critical issues with the usability and navigation and with the pages’ response time.
Goal: a clean website that allows users to search for persons with specific and a-specific queries, allows them to sort search results and to request a copy of the original obituary.
Design
The new design was kept simple and focussed around the search functionality. The front page is a screen-filling photograph of the physical archive and displays the search form from which to start. The top menu allows the user to browse the database and to gain more information about NFBA.
Custom scripts
The database is made with ‘participant database’, a fantastic plug-in by Xnau. It needed some tweaking to make it perfect for this website.
Combo & multi-search
Top priority was to improve the user search experience. The plugin allowed the user to only search for one condition at a time using a dropdown menu. This was tedious and impractical.
The website required a combo and multi search tool that allow for more specific searches. With a quick benchmark, I gathered the most relevant search field and started working.
I wrote a PHP script that generates a HTML form for the relevant search fields. The form executes an SQL query that uses all filled-in fields and returns the records that resemble the input.
Sortable tables
The table needed a sorting function for all data. This was created with some JavaScript lines. Some issues occurred with sorting surnames (in Dutch they often start with “van de” or similar, which should be ignored while sorting) and dates (they needed some reformatting to allow them to be sorted). Luckily this was easily fixed.
Optimization
The database is populated quite heavily, with currently over 30.000 records. The plugin had a hard time handling this, resulting in a very low response time. It sometimes took up to 25 seconds for a page to load! I optimized the needed SQL queries by minimizing the search fields and conditions. This greatly improved the website’s response.
Result
The new website has a modern and clean design, focusing on the search experience and ease of navigation. The two focus points of the project were improving the search experience and the website’s response time. Both goals were achieved.
29.450
Records added to the database
200+ %
increased page response-time