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Designing A Website For Your Class

Free Services That Can Help You

There are plenty of free services that give you the ability to design and maintain a web site for your classes. Some of these services are educator-centered and others are for just about anybody. The best thing about these services is that they provide you both with a means for making a web page and provide you with space on an Internet server (so that you can store your pages on the web and publish it for the world).

As with anything free, there is a catch. In return for the free tools and web space, these services post advertising on your web site. The advertising is out of your control. You cannot choose your own domain name. Let's say you want your web address to be www.thelittleschoolonthehill.com. Free services will not support this. If you are looking to create your own domain name Name Winner is by far the best way to find out what's available. Click here for Name Winner.

You also lose a great deal of creative control because these services use web layout templates. Your district site will look like the other 40,000 schools on their services. So much for trying to standout and be noticed.

Educator-Oriented Web Page Services:

1. School Notes-http://schoolnotes.com/

SchoolNotes.com complements school websites by allowing teachers to post school information on the world-wide-web without worrying about HTML or FTP because there is no programming required! And best of all, SchoolNotes.com is a free community service!

2. TeAch-nology.com- http://www.teach-nology.com/web_tools/web_site/

Many educators throughout the world have been contacting us. They have expressed interest in learning how to create a web site that can be used with their students. In the true spirit of TeAch-nology.com, we now offer a simple, and most importantly, FREE method that can be used to create your own personal web site.

General Web Services:

1. Homestead.com- http://www.homestead.com/

Homestead is consistently rated the best site for designing your own web page, both in ease of use and power. We definitely agree with critics that this site is easy and powerful. With no web design experience whatsoever, you could have your site up and running within twenty minutes. This site also gives you access to free clip art, animated images, and pre-written java applets that add spunk to your site without taxing your brain.

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