Now available is the W-F-T Toolbar to add fun and functionality to your browsing experience. The toolbar is available for both Internet Explorer (yuk!) or the far superior (in my eyes) Mozilla Firefox. For those of you have not yet tried Firefox it is available free from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/.
The W-F-T Toolbar can be installed from the Williams FamilyTree web site or directly via this link: http://wft.myfamilytoolbar.com/.
The toolbar is free, safe, and updates itself. It is also fully customisable so you can choose the options you want to see.
The W-F-T Toolbar comes with a standard search box that can be used to search the Williams Family Tree site whether you are currently looking at the site or not. It also allows you to search the site you are currently on or selected other sites such as Dictionary, Encyclopedia, News etc. Ok, so these sites are currently American but they may prove useful to you.
The links from the Tree Pages direct you straight to the page you want to go to on the Williams Family Tree site.
The RSS button displays all the News Items, Blogs and Comments in a single, easy to navigate place and the Message button displays all the comments from other users of the W-F-T Toolbar.
The next two buttons (currently) take you directly to the specified search pages on the ancestry.co.uk web site. Sometimes, navigation of the site gives me a headache and I don’t always seem to be able to get back to where I started from. Now all I need to do is very quickly follow the links from the Census or BMD tab in the W-F-T Toolbar and a new page will open to display the search options for the required page. Much, much easier and faster! It does help if you are subscribed to ancestry.co.uk to be able to see the full results.
Unfortunately, ancestry.co.uk and Firefox don’t always provide the results you might expect. However, there is a great solution for this and I can’t praise it enough! I strongly recommend the use of IE Tab available from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1419. Basically, IE Tab allows you to look at a page as if you were using Internet Explorer but from Firefox! It is fully customisable and allows you to switch between IE and Firefox browsing at the press of a button. Try it yourself and see – you may never use Internet Explorer again!
Finally, the Skype button is configured to contact me should you wish to do so. Obviously, you will need to have Skype installed on your computer – available from http://skype.com/intl/en-gb/. A VOIP phone would also be useful but not essential.
The remainder of the W-F-T Toolbar options, E-mail notifier, Privacy, Weather, etc. are optional extras that come as standard. Whether you choose to display them or not is entirely up to you. Just click on the little arrow next to the w-f-t logo, select Toolbar Options and make any changes you like.
I would love to know what you think of the toolbar and what improvements or additions could be made to it.
Enjoy,
Phil.
P.S. All the above links open in a new browser window.