User talk:RitcheyMT

Michael Ritchey is the manager of the Community and Virtual Reference team, a workgroup in the Worldwide Support Division of the Family History Department. This workgroup was formerly called Research Support.

Article headings
Wiki contributors frequently ask "How should I write articles. What kinds of information should I include?" To help answer this, a committee of FamilySearch employees and volunteers used a series of meetings to compile a list of the headings used by various authors in wiki articles, in FamilySearch publications, and in Record Search at FamilySearch Labs.

Replacement for portal template
The place portal pages (those titled "Portal:[place name]" use a MediaWiki template to create and lay out the boxes on the page. This template is problemmatical for two reasons. First, the content of each box on a portal page is actually a sub-page, so none of the content in the sub-pages is considered by search engines to be on the portal page itself. So although a portal's sub-pages may contain a lot of great content, search engines don't attribute any of that content to the portal page itself. That means words within in the sub-pages cannot be used in a search engine to find the portal page. As far as search engines are concerned, then, the Denmark portal page is just an empty shell with some code, not a content-rich page on everything you need to know about Danish research. This problem is common to external search engines like Google as well as the wiki's own search engine. To solve the problem, we need to find a more search-engine-friendly way to lay out boxes in our place pages. Mollie, Fran and Michael have all tried different solutions; have a look and see which ones you like.


 * 1) Mollie's England/Test1 page
 * 2) Fran's
 * 3) Michael's Pennsylvania page