Website

Perhaps the most important tool for enhancing TA presence is its website.

In his post "14 ways to Make your School Website Better", Terry Freedman suggests a lot of ideas also useful to TAs which may inspire you if you run out of ideas about how to improve your presence or exactly what to do next. He mentions things like, all of these points and more are highly relevant to a TA and many of these we are trying to help you with through this wiki.
 * The Website As A //Publishing// Medium, Not A //Technical// One
 * Regard The Maintenance Of The Website As A Collaborative Process
 * Weekly updates
 * Blog posts
 * Reports by members, users or the community

Website Builders
Improving the look and content of websites used to be a costly and difficult business but there are now many free website builder sites such as


 * []
 * []
 * []

Google also offers free 'pages' which are, in reality, mini websites,

These free website building sites make the creation of a website a much easier task as they provide sleek and functional templates to either improve the appearance of existing pages or help build a new website. Hosting is free, so TAs without a website can save on web hosting fees.


 * Some comments **

The cost of webhosting is not very high - here are a few comparison pages
 * Top 10 Webhosting
 * Web Hosting Topp 10
 * Find My Hosting

Once you have created your website, you can leave it on the server of whichever website builder you choose, or, if you have secured your own website through one of the hosting companies, you can upload it to your own address - which will usually be much easier for your members to remember.


 * Comment added 17/11/2011 ** Some colleagues report that these free website makers are quite difficult to manage and I have tried to do test runs on each one of them - my own recommendation goes to Weebly as the easiest of and one which is feature rich allowing you to create a **community**, a **forum** as well as a ** blog ** all on the same site.

=== **Weebly tutorial** ===

media type="youtube" key="UMBknOSR0CA?fs=1" height="390" width="480"

Here are a couple of screenshots to show you how they operate: //Some of the ready made templates you can find on// [|//http://www.webs.com///] //Some of the ready made templates you can find on// // [|http://www.wix.com] //

//A screenshot of a template in the process of being changed to include your own content from// []

Google Sites
Google provides some ready made website solutions which come with the webspace - again completely free.

to be continued.


 * Some Teachers' Associations websites **

Have a look at some good examples of TA websites to get ideas about your own.


 * **ELTA** the English Language Teachers' Association in Belgrade - Serbia has a great website with a discussion forum, photogalleries from events and links to all past issues of their Newsletter, MELT, in electronic format.
 * TESOL Chile has a great looking website, too and a link to their new Blog!