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How To Make Your Own Website For Kids

How to make your own website for kids when you don't know anything about HTML code or any of these other strange computer things.
I'm going to imagine that you are a grandmother who would like to create your own free website for kids, or to be more accurate, for your five-year-old grand daughter, to put her photos on.

Why do you want to?

• She likes taking photos, but if you email them to relatives on the other side of the world, their email program crashes, because the files are too big.
• She likes to tell you all about things she has seen
• You want to make her eager to learn to read and write
• She will enjoy seeing her own web pages and showing them to her friends

Create my own website for kids

OK, you know what you would like to do if only there was a way to do it without learning several textbooks full of computerese.

1. You don't want to have to spend anything.
2. You don't want to have to learn HTML or CSS
3. You want it to be simple enough for your grand daughter to do it herself in a year or two.
4. You want to have two photographs on each page, with a headline and a description under each photograph.
5. You will type in the description of each photograph given you by your grand daughter. You will probably have to summarize what she says, because she might chatter away for five minutes about one picture, and you only have space for a few lines in each description.
6. At the foot of each page you want to be able to click for the next page or to go back to the previous page.

Using MS Word

I quickly abandoned this idea. It sounded good, because if you have Windows you probably have Word installed. However, as you will see in the video, the code produced by Word is far too complicated

More about the kids free website video

The video will take a long time to load, because it is quite long. If you have a slow Internet connection, or even if you are just as impatient as I am, you might prefer to download it and view it as often as you like. Click the membership button at the bottom of the page to get access to all the video files. They are still free.

Using Arachnophilia to build your own website for kids

Word only works for Windows users. Arachnophilia is a great free program that works for Mackintosh, Windows, and most other operating systems as well. You need to have Java installed on your computer, but Java is free and may already be installed for the use of your browser.

You can get the program from http://www.arachnoid.com/arachnophilia

Preliminaries to show children how to build a website

Ask your Internet Service Provider to set you up with a free website. If the answer is "No." change your ISP to one that will give you the free website.

Your ISP will tell you the URL of your new website (it will be something like http://ISPdomain.com/~yourname/ ).

Make sure you find out from your ISP how to transfer your pages to your website, and what details to fill in for host and username and password when you use FTP. Get the free FileZilla FTP client program from http://filezilla-project.org/

Now you want to mirror your website on your own computer. That sounds worse than it is! Decide where you are going to keep your html files on your own computer. Suppose you decide to keep them in MyDocuments, go to MyDocuments and create a new folder there called MyWebsite or whatever you like to call it. (File > New > Folder then type in the name for your new folder)

Now go into the new folder and create a new folder called img (no capital letters) This is short for images, and is where you'll put copies of all the photos.

The reason for this arrangement is that you won't need to understand the file linking system to use it.

Finally you create a folder in your website called img, and FTP (using Filezilla) all your photos to that folder.

Template helps kids make their own website

Go to kidstemplate.txt and see where the asterisks are. You will replace the asterisks with your material for each page. You see the top asterisks are big and bold. That is where your page headline goes. The next asterisks are where your photos go, and the video will show you how to replace them with your photos. The next asterisks are for your back link, and the last asterisks are for your "next" link.

Now you tailor your Arachnophilia to create pages all laid out the same way by copying the kidstemplate.txt to replace the Arachnophilia template.

Here's how. Find a file called "template.html". If you are using a different operating system you'll have to do a search for the file, but in windows it should be in
C:/Documents and Settings/YourName/.Arachnophilia/Templates/template.html

Now go back to kidstemplate.txt and click on the File menu. The exact words depend on the browser you are using, but you choose to save the page that you are viewing. In the field for where you want to put the file, navigate to where the original template file is, then double-click that file. You'll be asked "The file already exists - do you want to replace it?" and you click for yes.

Now every time you click File > New > HTML you will be presented with an HTML file with asterisks in it, waiting for you to replace the asterisks with what you want. You save the file with a new name after you have made the changes. I suggest you call the files index.html, f002.html, f003.html, f004.html and so on, and that way you will always know what name to put in the next and last links at the bottom of the page.

Shrinking your pictures

The pictures from your camera are probably too big. Assuming that you don't have special photo software like Photoshop, the easiest way to shrink the photos is to download irfanview (free) and install it on your computer. Then you open a photograph file, click on image > resize/resample. Make sure there is a tick in the box for "Preserve aspect ratio" so that when you change the width, you will change the height in proportion.

Now set the width to 500 pixels, and save the file. If 500 is too large, you can shrink your pictures even more the same way.

The big advantage of shrinking your pictures is that you can fit more into the space that your ISP allows you for a free site.

To get your two button pictures, ( and ) right-click on the picture and download the picture to your img folder. In Opera it says "save image", in Firefox it says "Save image as..." and Internet Explorer says "save picture as". Keep the names the same so that they will work with my template.

Template has missing head section

The head section is important for money-making sites, but it's simpler to miss it out if you just want to build your own website for kids. You will email the index.html URL to all your friends, and they will copy and paste it into their browsers. The head section isn't needed to create your own free website for kids. This is as simple as I can make it.

The video will show you how easy it is to fill in the details on the template without knowing anything about HTML. So you can make your own website for kids without knowing anything at all about HTML. See how proud your grand daughter is of her website, and how she drags everyone to the computer to show them. See how she tries to learn to read the words as you point to them on her screen and read them out.

Get your webmaster tools and resources while they are still free.

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