From GLS761 Banner. The purpose of this site is to demonstrate how to build a website to suppliment a course or even teach online when needed, such as during snowdays or emergencies. All of the applications used here are FREE  .
Steps to creating your website 1. Determine the number of pages you want, create and name them. Don't enter any content yet. 2. Create a template with the page layout including the menu, menu links to all pages, table format,background
color, etc. 3. Copy the HTML code from your template and paste it into the HTML code window for each of your pages. 4. On each page break the active page link and change the color, so its clear which page your navigating to.
Select the menu items on the top of this site and you'll see what I mean.
HTML Although it's not necessary that you know html it doesn't hurt to be familiar with basic tags. You may find that a font size for paragraph is different from the rest and using the editor doesn't work. The only way to solve the problem is to open the html widow and review the code to see what is different. Perhaps the font size is "large" instead of "18". The Webmonkey HTML Cheatsheet has a great summary of the common tags used in this program. Creating the Banner I created this banner using an image from Google Earth (or maps) that I edited in Picnik. I then loaded the image into Picasa (a free google app), click on it, and chose the "embed image" text. The next step was to copy the html text and paste it into the html editor on this page, or the templates as described below. Make sure that when you choose the "embed text" option that you also indicate the image size, otherwise you might end up with a thumbnail-size image as your banner.
Choosing a Course Management System (CMS) for your Course
You can create lesson plans here on your website, however, I recommend using a course management system that will enable you to create lesson plans, quizzes, messaging, discussions, flashcards and calendar dates, as well as keep track of grades. There are several available however I prefer Engrade. It's straight forward and intuitive.
Presentations There are several powerpoint-like online presentation programs, such as SlideShare, GoogleDoc Present, and the more dynamic SlideRocket. However, viewing powerpoints gets tedious. There are other ways to present your material and keep your students' attention. For quick and easy presentations I prefer Prezi. In Prezi you place all your content on one page and simply draw a path defining the order. Embedding youtube video and content links is a breeze. Here a presentation that I made on the formation of minerals and rocks; it took less than half an hour to assemble. Unfortunately, Engrade allows you to embed a powerpoint into a lesson plan but not a Prezi presentation, however, you can link to it.
Creating Menus with links You can list links on a page, however, sometimes I like to make a more flashy link menu using a table. Below I created a table with 6 columns and 2 rows and added sites that teachers and student might visit the most. As a teacher, you can make a menu containing the sites you specifically want the students to use and that you know are safe. I created the site menu bar at the top of the page using a 1 x 5 table. (I couldn't get the "My Website Link Builder" in this program to work.) When creating links you can choose to open a page in a new window or in the same frame. Your navigation buttons should open in the same frame, however, you may want other links to open in another window so you're not taken away from this website. Creating links in cells is buggy and browser dependent in this program! I was finally able to create the links in Camino. I tried Safari, Firefox and Opera (Mac) and Explorer (PC), none of which worked well. However, of the latter four browsers Opera worked best.
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