Have a look at http://ourillustriousfamily.com/dixon-spain/. The vertical family tree is enabled in the righthand column and each family member has their own page. We did have a front page like you described, but it wasn’t going to help search engine optimisation.

Best Charles

I am happy with the magazine format but have not found a way of creating the family tree layout without falling back on tables or individual Div tags to replicate the vertical format.

Does anyone have ideas on this?

Several reasons:

Yes collaboration is part of it … Membership across blogs is integrated and means family members can contribute to all the family lines they have knowledge of

Using WPMU means I can easily create new blogs for new familial lines, and then link them as you would normal blogs.

As you’ll see from my main effort at the moment, the WP page hierarchy really only suits one line per blog, but this is also of benefit if, as like me, you want the pages to be as widely available as possible on search engines. Look at the urls — they’re full of the surname.

And of course doing a site for each grandparent means you have four sites for SEO purposes and more likelihood of getting hits and therefore information. The D-S site has benefitted incalculably from being stumbled upon by a researcher who was looking at the family because one of my great great great uncles was vicar of Lutton.

I am in the process of implementing BuddyPress / BBPress on this as well, which should mean the collaborative element comes to the fore, and will allow family members to discuss the tree even though they be very remote from one another.

Lastly, as I am going to do this anyway, and the sites will remain in place ad infinitum, it seems an obvious solution to give others the opportunity of using this work via the site and pay for via Google Ads.

Best Charles

PS if you want to fool about with WPMU Bluehost are offering auto install of BuddyPress + WPMU via Simple Scripts.