Website creation has two major purposes in academia:

• Information Technology faculty may want to teach students to build websites.
• Faculty in any subject area may wish to create their own Website to house course related materials.

There are two major ways to create a website:

• through the use of a template.  The following are free templates:
  
  • http://www.freelayouts.com which includes blog and myspace layouts as well as general webpage layouts
  • http://www.2createawebsite.com/build/templates.html which includes some very simple site designs
  • http://www.templatesbox.com which categorizes templates by the site purpose for easier searching.  These templates offer the bones of a professional looking website without the content.  In order to put your content on the Web, you still need a program to edit that HTML code to make it your own.  Some webhosts provide these online.

• through coding, typically HTML, likely with CSS or other technologies.
  • Notepad or any traditional text editor will allow saving an html file
  • Alleycode offers a free html editor with full support for HTML, XHTML, CSS, and PHP for PCs.  Text entered is color-coded to aid in debugging, although we do find the fact that green indicates an error is somewhat counterintuitive.  Alleycode allows interactively flipping to a browser to view the page you are editing, or opening a window within Alleycode for  a synchronized view.  Alleycode includes the ability to work on multiple pages at one time and a 'color picker' function that will insert the appropriate hexadecimal value for a color selected.  It also includes ftp access within the program for uploading Web files to a server, as well as a built-in HTML/CSS tutorial.
  • Komodo Edit is available in both a Mac and a PC version.  Unlike Komodo IDE, which is a paid product, Komodo Edit is based on the Mozilla code base and licensed as free to use under the same terms as Firefox.  While somewhat more complex to use than Alleycode, it offers more features.