Guidelines

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This page has been created to provide users with a quick guide to navigating the site and using its search facilities.

Domain names

Jerripedia uses three different domain names to make it as easy as possible to find the site. They are:

  • www.jerripedia.org
  • www.jerripedia.com
  • www.theislandwiki.org

Whichever of these is used, either on its own or with a subsidiary URL, users will immediately see the side bar on the left which provides access to a variety of pages, including this one. If you have followed a link which has not taken you to the Home page and want to move on to explore the rest of the site, you are advised to click on the Home Page link under the logo at the top of the sidebar.

The domain out of the three above which was used for initial access will show in your browser bar throughout your navigation. Whichever is in use you will see exactly the same page content as you move from menu to menu.

Site structure

The site is far too large to allow for the use of a site map to navigate, but the basic structure is very simple and easy to learn.

Main menu pages

There are a number of ways of moving around the site, but the easiest is to start with the Home page and then move on to one of the main subject menus.

If you click on this link a page will open with links to Main subjects in one box and Family research, the core of the site, in a box alongside. Clicking on any subject link will take you to a subsidiary menu, leading direct to the subject(s) you are interested in

There are also other links on the page taking you to our Facebook group' and a main menu for the site's picture collection.

Indexes

As an alternative to navigating through the menu structure, the site includes indexes of main pages and also of pages containing picture galleries. We try to maintain these indexes as the site expands, but you may not find everything you are looking for here. Links to these indexes will be found in the sidebar.

Categories

Please note that we do not use Categories, as you will find in Wikipedia and some other Wikis. We think our menu structure and search facilities are more efficient means of finding what you are looking for

Search facilities

Google

If you want to go direct to any content you believe is likely to be in the site, we have two search facilities, accessible from the sidebar. The first takes you to the very fast and functional Google search which most users will already be familiar with. You probably used it to find this site in the first place.

If you click on the text in the google search box you will open a Google search with the search window already partially completed with site:jerripedia.org. Type a space and the text you are searching for and Google will look for it throughout the site, with the usual options to search for all occurrences of your search term, or just images.

You can widen or narrow the terms of your search as you can for any Google search of the whole web.

Because of the way Google stores search results, there is some content which it indexed when the main URL in use by the site was www.theislandwiki.org which does not appear in a search using jerripedia.org. If you fail to find what you are looking for, edit the search window to site:theislandwiki.org and try again.

As with any Google search, content will be found whether you use capital letters or not, and there is no need to use accented characters. If you make a spelling error, Google will helpfully suggest what you might have meant to ask for.

Wiki search

The Wiki software on which this site is based has its own search facility. This can be found in the box towards the bottom of the sidebar.

Using this search has advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages:

  • You can enter your search word(s) in the search box without having to leave the site to use Google, so it is potentially much faster
  • By using the Go option you can go direct to a page whose title exactly matches your search

Disadvantages:

  • The Wiki search is limited in its flexibility. It is case sensitive, so you need to include capital letters exactly as they appear in the text you are searching for
  • This search will only find the exact search string you enter. So 'restaurant' will not find 'restaurants' and 'restaurants' will not find 'restaurant'. This can be very frustrating, and is the reason we have added a Google search. The facility is much more useful for single words than a more complicated text string.
  • The search will fail if you make a spelling error and it willl not find accented characters. This is why we do not use accents in any of our page titles

Let us know what you think

Unfortunately we cannot offer to find content in Jerripedia which you have failed to locate using one of the approaches outlined on this page, but we do welcome your general views on the ease or otherwise of navigating the site.

Please don't suggest introducing categories! The site is far too large to go down this route 12-plus years after it was launched.

Please email any comments you have to editorial@jerripedia.org

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