Family Websites - How to Build a Family Website

With the holidays long gone, impress your family by sharing the photos you took in a snazzy, interactive way. Building a Web page is a weekend project your grandchild can do with you — no matter how far apart you live from one another. Showcase your snapshots. Display text written by your grandchild. Together, choose a fitting color palette. Anyone can do this!

Identify Your Page

First, get together with your grandchild, even by phone, and select a name for the page you are going to create. The page name becomes the Web page address, or domain name. Mine is DigitalGrandparent or DigitalGrandparent.com. Have a few back-up choices in mind. With billions of Web pages out there, someone may have already registered your first choice. You might use your surname and add .com to it. If another family has called first dibs, modifying the name slightly (ClarkFamily.com, ChicagoClarks.com, GrandmaClarksKids.com) may improve your chance of nabbing the personalized domain name you want — or something close to it.

Find out if the name you'd like is available by going to Whois.net. Type the name you want into the Get Your Domain Name field. Select .com from the drop-down menu and click “Go.” If you see a link to a Web page, sorry, that name is taken. Try again. If a name is available, you’ll be invited to register it for an annual leasing fee, about $10.

Text, or journaling, is easy. Have your grandchild write a paragraph, a story about what happened during the holiday dinner, and e-mail it to you. Together, you can write photo captions. Later, you’ll paste those into your page design.

Add Photos to Tell the Story
Select clear pictures with definite focal points to accompany the text. Upload the images from your camera or scan them into your computer (brush up on your scanning skills here: Scan Your Photos, Protect Your Photos). After you've retrieved your photos, make a note of which folder you put them into.

Design a Web Page

You’ll need software, an HTML editor, to put it all together and get the finished design up on the Internet. My favorite is CoffeeCup. It’s been around a long time, and costs less than $50. Plus, you can download and use it free for 30 days. CoffeeCup is so user-friendly, you’ll feel like a Web design pro.

SiteGenWiz is another option. It's a free program that includes a boatload of splashy ready-made templates. With either, follow the page-setup Wizard that opens when you choose file/new page. You’ll drag pictures from your folders to the editing software. Type your journaling directly into the text boxes on the page workspace, or copy and paste from your word processor into the text boxes.

Phone your grandchild. You can work with him or her to choose the perfect color scheme. It’s fun to browse other Web pages together, too, to see what clever ideas other families have generated. When you select a scheme from SiteGenEx, it is automatically plugged into your Web page. With CoffeeCup, you can mix and match individual colors for background, text, and other components. Once you've arrived at something you like, don't forget to save your page!

Find a Home on the 'Net

Hosting companies such as Lunar Pages (Google for Web hosting) keep copies of your Web pages on their computers until a browser connects to display them. They charge about $7 a month for that service and offer step-by-step instructions, tools, and tech support. When you publish the page — voila! — your page is instantly visible online and your original is safely stored on your computer. You may want to store the pages in a folder on the C drive of your computer and name it Family Web Pages.

To post your Web page live to the Internet, click "Launch" or "Publish" in your editing software. This sends copies of your page, including pictures and text, to the host’s server computers. When someone types your Web page URL (such as www.DigitalGrandparent.com) into Internet Explorer’s address bar, IE connects to that host server and displays your page.

MyFamily.com offer various package plans. Though it's not big on creativity, you don’t need any software to create a Web page there. When accepting the free subscription, however, you are agreeing to allow advertising (of their choice) to appear on your page. Also, if you go this route, you can’t select a domain name. But if you appreciate the ease of point-and-click Web design, you may prefer this option.

All done? Want to make changes? Or maybe you'd like to try out a forward-looking spring theme. No sweat. In your editor, simply make a new page with fresh journaling text and new photos. Save and publish it as you did in the steps above. The new page replaces the old. Be sure to keep your original pages on your hard drive. You might want them later. Make small additions or changes to a page by opening an original page in your editor, making corrections, saving, and publishing the page again. As you and your grandchild develop your skills, you can begin adding animation, music, and more pages. A perfect way to spend time together — and a perfect project for another day!