<p>I’m ready to make a website for my classes (I’m a teacher). What is the best program, either software or online, to use. I don’t want to spend a lot of money or learn html or any other computer language. I don’t need a lot of bells and whistles, and I work on a Mac. </p>
<p>Ideas? Experiences?</p>
<p>I hired my daughter for $75 to make a blog/website for me. I have static pages and the blog as well. She used free software from [■■■■■■■■■■■■■</a> Get a Free Blog Here](<a href=“http://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■%5DWordPress.com”>http://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■) and hosted it at [Web</a> Hosting by DreamHost Web Hosting: Web Sites, Domain Registration, WordPress, Ruby on Rails, all on Debian Linux!](<a href=“http://www.dreamhost.com%5DWeb”>http://www.dreamhost.com)</p>
<p>The wordpress software is lovely, I don’t need to know any HTML or any other language to use it. </p>
<p>You can also have a free blog with static pages at [■■■■■■■■■■■■■</a> Get a Free Blog Here](<a href=“http://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■%5DWordPress.com”>http://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■) completely for free, but you end up with (yourname).■■■■■■■■■■■■■ which might or might not work for you. I did that for six months before my daughter talked me into moving over. If you like, I can PM you links for my website and my daughter’s, both of which were created that way. Send me a PM if you want the links.</p>
<p>Dreamweaver software</p>
<p>hosting by GoDaddy.Com</p>
<p>Will this website be hosted on the school system’s web server? If not, first find a website hosting company like your cable/dsl company’s included webspace or godaddy.com, etc. and take a look at their free (included actually) website builders. It makes it easy to build a website.</p>
<p>Otherwise, you can use software from Adobe, MS Frontpage (if it’ll work on your Mac), or google “free web site building software”. You can also use something as simple as a basic text editor if you know HTML but you’re better off with a richer development environment. You can even use some word processors like MS Word and save the doc as an HTM file.</p>
<p>Start out basic with a rough outline so you don’t get bogged down in the technicalities and details and then build from there.</p>
<p>Or, find another teacher friend who has a website similar to what you want and ask if you can use their website code as a starting point, copy it to your space, and then get in and start changing things around like names, text, colors, rearrange a few things, etc.</p>
<p>Edit - crossed with ‘soproudofkids’.</p>
<p>MS Frontpage is a thing of the past, now it’s MS Expression Web</p>
<p>link to free trial version:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.microsoft.com/Expression/products/overview.aspx?key=web[/url]”>http://www.microsoft.com/Expression/products/overview.aspx?key=web</a></p>
<p>but Dreamweaver’s better…</p>
<p>iWeb is a program that comes with the newer Mac. It is sooo easy to use and the websites look great.</p>
<p>The blogging software suggestion is the best! WordPress happens to be one of the best and simplest to use.</p>
<p>As dmd77 said above, there are some considerations:
<p>Thanks for all of the great ideas and tips. I didn’t even know I had iWeb on my new Mac, so I think that’s a good starting point. My H says we have some free space on our cable internet account, so I could put it there or host it on .mac for a reasonable price… the teachers at my current school don’t have web pages, but I’m hoping to get a new teaching assignment at a school where all teachers use the web to post daily work, homework, resources, etc… for students and parents. I need to get up to speed. (I do have a myspace account, but that’s different… fun but different.)</p>
<p>One question, if I put the website up now on our cable internet site or on .mac, can I easily move it to the school’s server (and change the address of it)? All the teachers at the school I hope to go to have the same www address followed by their last name. Their web pages are all quite different and some are obviously templates from teacher web sites, but the web addresses are similar when you open them up.</p>
<p>Sorry for the basic questions… and thanks for being patient!</p>
<p>As with any “free” solutions for hosting, read the fine print! It might come with a subdomain (youraddress.cablecompany.com), usually long and hard to memorize. Or other stuff you don’t need.
In case of the school you mention, once the kids are used to input the school’s address + the teacher’s name, shouldn’t be an issue. And that’s normally a one time issue, since anybody can “bookmark” an address.
Depending on what soft the school uses, it could happen that updating your pages is more complicated than with a blogging app. But there should be kids that can help!
In terms of moving files, it’s better to have local backups since each application (blog) is based on dynamically generated pages. That means that your copy is put into a database and then compiled with the rest of a template that gives that “look” to your pages. If you like a certain “look” and want to preserve/move it, will involve some customization.</p>
<p>An easy way with no software expense, no domain expense to have a website is through Google sites. </p>
<p>[Welcome</a> to Google Sites](<a href=“http://sites.google.com/]Welcome”>http://sites.google.com/)</p>
<p>Dreamweaver is pretty expensive. You can either pay an arm for just dreamweaver, or an arm and a leg for the entire Adobe Creative Suite</p>
<p>godaddy for domains. fatcow for hosting. has been working for my friend. check out his site on [Whoops</a> America!](<a href=“http://www.whoopsamerica.com%5DWhoops”>http://www.whoopsamerica.com)</p>
<p>Since I posted this a year and a half ago, I’ve immersed myself in technology and have built three websites using iWeb (program that came on my Mac) which I host through MobileMe for $99 a year, one GoogleSites wiki site that is free, and a site using open source content management system called Joomla, with the URL purchased from GoDaddy and the site hosted by Solar Energy Host (all solar). </p>
<p>I can’t believe how much I learned in 18 months. Wow. Go me! :)</p>
<p>If you live near a community college that teaches HTML or web design classes, you can look into having a student make a site for you. Probably wouldn’t be too expensive. :)</p>
<p>Wordpress also has an app for iphone/itouch</p>
<p>Rapidweaver is $49. It’s not as powerful as Dreamweaver, but it’s pretty easy to use, especially with the extra plug-in called “Stacks” from YourHead.</p>
<p>MacHighway is a mac-friendly web hosting site which costs half as much as MobileMe. It’s straightforward to send your web pages from Rapidweaver to MacHighway, a little more work to get from iWeb to MacHighway but they have instructions on how to do it.</p>
<p>momof2inca
Yay! Very cool.</p>
<p>Good for you, Mominca! (I want to know if you have a little Inca image as your mascot on your site? 
)</p>
<p>I pulled this up again because I have some more questions:</p>
<p>My son’s birthday is in a couple weeks, and he’s been wanting to create a website for his music for awhile. I thought buying him a domain name would be cool. But can you do that for someone else? When you “buy” a domain name are you really “renting” it - that is, is there an annual cost? Once you have a name, eg. <a href=“http://www”>www</a>. binxson . com - can you move it around from one host to another? Or does the original host get to keep the name?</p>
<p>Sometimes I’ll type in a defunct address and it will go to a page offering me the opportunity to buy that particular address. Who gets to decide who sells what address?</p>
<p>Sorry if these questions are off the wall. I really am clueless.</p>
<p>His website needs to allow him to upload sound (music clips), post pictures, sell his compositions, etc. And it should be easy to create, edit, and maintain.</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>I like GoDaddy [Browser</a> Update Page](<a href=“http://www.godaddy.com%5DBrowser”>http://www.godaddy.com) for website purchases. They allow you to create your own website and also explain how all that works.</p>
<p>binx - There is an annual cost, which is small. I pay ten years at a time for our family domain name, and it’s still not much. If you don’t want the name any more, you can let the fee lapse and the name will become available for someone else to register. You can move a name around from one host to another, but there’s a 60-day hold period before you can do a transfer to the next host after you register the name.</p>
<p>When you type in an address and it is offered for sale, it’s probably from a vendor who has registered hundreds or thousands of names on spec, hoping to find people who will pay a premium price for them. It’s a pain when you can’t find the name you want, but I suggest that you get creative and keep trying. I hate the idea of paying someone else for a name they’re just squatting on; it bugs me.</p>
<p>I registered a couple of domains with GoDaddy in June and I was very disappointed with their customer service when I had a couple of questions. It took literally days to get through to someone and I ended up getting another vendor to give me the name of one of their managers, which was the only way I could get a callback. They had an online help system that wouldn’t work with any of my browsers, so I had to use the phone and it was very frustrating. </p>
<p>I like MacHighway in part because they have outstanding customer service. When you call, you get a real human being who really knows the answers, and they’re very kind to newbies. If you are a PC person, I bet there is an equivalent service out there for you.</p>
<p>I think your gift idea is very cool!</p>