It is very easy to make a simple website (honest!), and making one is a brilliant way to become familiar with the Internet and how it works, whoever or wherever you are.

For schools, making a website provides the opportunity to encourage computer literacy among pupils and staff. Such projects can give an enormous boost to other areas of school work as children work in a creative way with text and images to make their pages.
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Planning - involving the whole school

Think of the World Wide Web as a series of linked communities. Your school is a community and the school website acts as a welcome to visitors. It is a virtual 'Open Day'. Thinking of it in this way will help you build your site and decide what to put on your pages and where.

Some parents may want to use the site to find news and information about school policy, while other parents, children or prospective members of your community may want to get an idea of the atmosphere in your school and see what work children in various classes may be doing, as may visitors from abroad.
The best way to get all this onto your website will be to involve the whole school in planning what should go onto your site.
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Design - some tips

Encourage the school to make their designs on paper first. A piece of A4 held sideways is roughly the size of many computer screens, and can be a good place to start.
You can of course scroll down pages (or sideways!); the latter is best avoided though, so make sure your design is not wider than most computer screens.

Design is a very personal thing! On the more formal pages you might want to keep backgrounds unfussy and not use too many different fonts or sizes of type. Also make sure there is a good contrast between any background colour or image and your text colour. As a rule, the simpler the design the better.

Remember the way the formal pages are designed needn't affect how the classwork pages look. Encourage the children to look at websites, and experiment with different colours and ideas for their own page designs. Their taste may be very different to yours though and it's up to you how much you want to intervene!
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Using your website

Make sure everybody is involved in adding to the site and keeping it up to date.

To make sure the site remains organised you may want to establish an editorial team, made up of a number of older pupils who edit the site for a few weeks at a time.

Many schools publish regular newsletters. Make sure these are always put as quickly as possible onto the site. Make sure term dates are up there too, and are up to date.

As the site develops, try to get as many people as possible in the school familiar with the software so they can edit and create pages. However, a responsible adult should always check content before it is uploaded.

Try making contact with other schools with websites, perhaps in foreign countries you are studying. You can share information about your schools and areas.

If staff or pupils become adept at using the site, there are many advanced features you can create by using your website as the base of an internal network (intranet). You could use features such as news groups, email lists, white boards and so on, but before beginning to create these features, you have a responsibility to make sure your intranet is totally secure.

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