Hello, my co-teacher and I facilitate social skills playgroups for 3-6 year olds and have been slowly explanding our business. It's time for us to get more official and we're looking at setting up a website. For a non-techno savvy preschool teacher, this looks rather daunting with all of the different options. Can anyone who has experience with this provide us some direction? Thanks, in advance!
I recently did one using Kompozer (free download) to create the site and Eazydraw (another freeware) for graphics. Feel free to email me questions!
p.s. I am looking to expand my website portfolio and can help you for free if you would like.
J.
We are using Macs at school in the fall had the kids build their website on iWeb, which allows them to create and store the website. This spring they learned how to use DreamWeaver, which we are linking to our class website, which we created in DreamWeaver. You can do a tutorial on Dream Weaver and it's simple.
Stephanie
It can be done beautifully in minutes or it can take much more time. Depends upon your needs.
I set up both a website and blog for my daughter's preschool. The blog in particular became a great asset to parents as the teachers took to journaling about classroom activities.
The website contained for the larger community and the blog was used within the internal community.
While they needed to own their domain, you may not be in that position and you might be inexpensively and easily satisfied with something like a google blog account, or wordpress has some great layouts that look very much like websites instead of blogs.
If you don't need to own a domain which costs money, not much but does cost, then consider Google or Wordpress blogs. I think I prefer Wordpress for the flexibility of designs.
I use a web builder site. http://www.clicksoncall.com/
I am pretty much a novice at managing a website, but I find this site easy. You can check out my website at www.suspendedintimesantarosa.com
If they ask for how you found them just put in my email address: ____@____.com
You can ask me any questions that you have. They are pretty good at providing technical support.
J. C.
I recently updated my website and looked at all the options. The best one I found is www.squarespace.com. They are a hosting/design company and have lots of easy to use templates, tracking software (you can see what brings people to your site). It took me a weekend to set up everything. I priced out custom designing my site and found that it would cost between 2-3K to hire a designer. Squarespace charges between $10-30 a month (you can cancel at any time too). Their technical support is good and fast.
My website is www.ketubah-arts.com, if you want to see what I did with their templates. i've been with them for about 6 mos and am pretty happy with them.
J.,
This sounds like such a good business idea! I built my own website using the free Yahoo Sitebuilder and publish through Yahoo. I found the process very user friendly. Check out my website: www.bearhugsunlimited.com
Wishing you continued success,
Y..
J.,
Go to www.wix.com you can set up a free site or pay for one but it's soooo easy to use. We love it.
Good luck!
Shutterfly has these free sites, drag a drop easy to do websites called Sharesites: http://www.shutterfly.com
Hi There!
Try www.yola.com. It is a website where you can design your own website for free. You can buy the domain from them or from some one else. It is for non-techy people to design and maintain their own site.
Best of luck! -L.
Depending on what you want to do with it, you may want to look into using a Wiki instead of a traditional website. It is MUCH easier to use, can give access to a number of different types of pages (with video, pictures, text, etc.) and doesn't require much design knowledge. It will not look fancy like a lot of websites, but if you're just looking for something basic and easy to use, its great. I use PBwiki (http://www.pbwiki.com)for my class websites and they have a number of examples you can look at. Extra added bonus - they are free for academic purposes!
Hi J.. I create websites for a living, please email me your specific questions and concerns and I'll try to point you to the right software. : )
C.
I have been the webmaster for a software company in Boston for 10 years. Since moving and having kids, I telecommute from home. If you want to email me off the board with a little more detail, I'd be happy to give you some suggestions. What will you be using your site for? What type of info do you need to present, and who is your target audience? How much do you want to spend? That sort of thing.
N.
