I do the web site for our school, www.lakeforestelementaryschool.com We registered the domain name through GoDaddy.com. We also have them host the site. It was relatively inexpensive and can be purchased for two years at a time. I originally started designing in Front Page which can be very much like using other Microsoft Office products. I currently use Dreamweaver. DO NOT pay for a service to create or manage your web site. You will absolutely have some parent who would love, ok maybe more like be willing, to take ownership of this. You just need to make known the need. If all else fails, I have found that many high school students are far better at this than I (and I'm not bad). Check with the tech teachers at the local high school and see if they have someone they could recommend to take this on as a service project. If you want you could hire the student to do the job for far less than you would pay a service. There will undoubtedly be a student who want to work in this field and could use the resume building.

Hi Tom,
I just put it together without any guidence. I did the John Hole site first. Then I just copied what I could for the CKV site. Next year CKV (a kindergarten only school) will no longer exist (splitting into 2 new K-1 schools), so I will update the site and change it as the summer progresses. I wanted to include all the activities that PTO is involved with and a short description for each (these sites are still works in progress). Most of the "inner" pages stay the same. I try to update the home page on at least a weekly basis (obviously it doesn't always work out) but the big advantage of a web site is up to the minute information. I tried to keep the PTO site just that, a PTO site! If the school asked me to put something on the website I would. We do have a link to the school district site and vice versa. The John Hole site seems to be working well for us. I do not have a website or computer background (former 1st grade teacher) so there are things I would like to do, but I am learning as I go.

Did you have any guidence on what to include or not include in your web site? We are just setting it up.

I have signed up with goDaddy. We are changing over to use their email marketing program for the distribution of our newsletter and got the web site for only a few dollars extra.

Hi! You can check out two websites I have done. I'm a little behind-End of year- PTO President (2nd year), getting ready to split kindergarten PTO... You all know the story!!!! Anyway here are the links:
www.ckvpto.org
www.johnholepto.org

I used frontpage (easy-seems like it would be hard but if you can do word you can do frontpage) and our server is GO Daddy- it cost around $45.00 for the year. We have never been down nor have we had any problems!

We tried all the free services. They seem to come and go. We were tired of the ads and popus and no support. One of our members found www.relaybuilder.com and we are very happy. It is the only service I have seen that is especially for parent teacher groups.

Several of us have access to make updates. Very easy to use. Updates are made directly in the browser without needing any software. We have members register to the site and then send newsletters. We have over 100 active members on the site even though less than 20 show up for meetings.

We use bravenet.com and our website is brentpto.com. It is completely separate from the schools. There is a link on the school page that goes to ours. It is run by a mom with a stay at home business...she rocks...d