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Developing your own website

The Internet is increasingly being used by agencies, NGOs and community groups alike to create increased public awareness of issues related to sustainability, share information and develop contacts through international networking. One way to do this is through the use of discussion groups, the other is to develop your own web presence. This page provides a guide to links that will help you find all the resources you need to get started on your own website development. Click on the growing role of the Internet page to see how other groups and organisations are using the Internet and how this can impact on community development.

The good news is that provided you enjoy reasonable access to the Internet, establishing your presence on the Internet need not cost the earth. These days most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offer room for a Web site along with Internet connectivity. But a number of places also provide free hosting, and a range of additional services. Whether you're new to webdesign or an old pro, the links below will guide you to free or relatively low-cost resources that will get you started with HTML, help you with site design and promotion, and point you to where you can access the resources you need to build and host your own site.

Here are a range of tutorials to help you formatting your material for the Web. Many sites that provide hosting will also provide free assistance and wizards to help with this, but with these guides its not hard to learn enough HTML to get started.

In general, the best way to figure out how to do things with the Web is to experiment, and to look at what other people have done and how they have done it. Use the command in your browser to see how other people have constructed their HTML. In the end it's your site, and should reflect you or your organization's individuality .... but there are some clear do's and don'ts if you want your visitors to enjoy their time at your site.

And finally when your site is up and running .... it's time to promote it. This is perhaps the most forgotton part of site management, but why go to all the hard work of building it if no-one comes and visits.

And here are links to some of the the services and tools I used in developing this site (just click on the icons to access these resources):

CoffeeCup - HTML Editor- Flash - Web Design Software spacer CoffeeCup - HTML Editor
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spacer Web Hosting by Site5.com
spacer XML-sitemaps.com
Valid Robots.txtspacer Robots.txt Checker
spacer Website keyword suggestions
Free Search Engine Submission spacer Free Search Engine Submission
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Internet research tools that are really useful

More resources can be found at sites such as these:

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