LUVMYKIDS, I'm looking in to tapping into our school's site, which is what they perfer. When say you create a page, are you talking about just a Word document, Publisher, or some other type of document. I'm going to talk to the Principal and see if I can talk to the Technology Department to find out more information.

If it's something as simple as the above docs. I can handle it.

We are building our own site. However, we do have a PTO member who is good at this computer stuff.
So far we can highly recommend www.hostfor2bucks.com this is a company that I found from reading ptotoday! We spent $29 for a year and that included our own domain name. There are no adds no pop-ups and we get 10 email address. This is nice so that the board members have a PTO email, we chose to have it forwarded to our personal email accounts. We have even called this company a few times and they have been very helpful.
Good Luck to you

Hi,

sorry for the really long response....

in the begining of the 04 year I found this site
www.orgsites.com it is a free place where non profits can build your own website FREE, but limited to 10 pages but does not seem to limit the size of content(megs, K etc.). it is definitly a beginners build your own site site, very informative and explains how to do everything.
I was able to put the basic site together in about two hours, and it looks semi professional. they have existing backgrounds that you pick and choose, and you can add pictures and clip art, as well as make forms available on the site for parents to down load, (pdf's and editable MSword docs), there is an email database to send out mass mailings in which parents can add their name to..or not, and a calender for events.
It is user friendly enough that it can be updated very very easily 24/7.
The other pros to this site do not have to buy any web site building software, which is kinda expensive, I think domain names cost from $8.00 and up, but finding a host may get very expensive.

the one downside I've found, about this site is the long name for our site, but our school added it their webpage as a link and parents seem to go directly from there. I think there may be limits to the design of the web sites ifyou wanted to get really really fancy.

If you have a parent who does web design, get them to do one!!! I created the site then a parent who is a web site designer called and offered his help and he has helped alot lately, with adding charts and already created web pages.

please feel free to visit ours
www.orgsites.com/ma/gwspto

remember I created this with NO IDEA WHAT SO EVER how to make a web page, (but some MSWord experience). I learned everthing from the on site instructions.

Having the website, I feel, is a great PR thing. allowing parents to get info at their convience, and it was very well received when it was shown at our general meeting. and it allowd parents to follow a 4 week box top contest we ran, they could see the weekly totals on line.

If you have questions, you can email me, if you choose to do the website at org sites, let me know I can save you from some of my mistakes, which I wish I could do over.

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Good luck,
Andrea

Does your school district have a website? We got a link on our school district site so all we had to do was create our page and send it to them. It was very simple and cost us nothing!

How many of you hired someone to develop the base for your web site versus building it your self? If so, was it worth the investment to have it done and how much did you spend?

I am considering the option vs a bandaide of building one ourselves.

Please let me know your experiences with this.