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Joined: Jun 10 2008 Posts: 172

I have been in a year long campaign to become become a music teacher in a high school in mass. I've passed all the tests, gotten all my reccs in order, and I am now beginning to apply to schools. I had a really great idea to build a fake website to show principles how I can organize their classes and my lessons and projects online so it benefits the students greatly. I have no previous experience building websites and no previous experience with any programming language but I am motivated and want to learn an effective efficient goodlooking way to do this. I'd love some ideas on easiest ways to learn how to do this or GOOD services that create excellent websites for free etc. Anything you have that can do what I want. I'll list my ideas for stuff I want to put on the website below. Thanks in advance.

1. Be able to give musical notations (dynamic markings, pronounciation etc) to students before rehearsal, thus saving time during class etc.
2. announcements (ie rehearsals, concerts, fundraisers, auditions,)
3. Interactive calendar featuring recital dates, event dates, notes on events, project deadlines and homework deadlines.
4. I want to be able to post student powerpoint presentations to be used by the students as study aids for finals etc etc, i want to put the onus on them.
5. copy of syllabus
6. Concert programs, including pedagogical notes and historical background on each peice.
7. Inbed youtube videos.
8. A simple reference for the International Phoenetic Alphabet
9. contact info.
10. a secure way of students retrieving their grades.

Basically my plan for applying would be to provide a link to this website and i would have a fake schedule, classes, calendars, and mutlimedia files so that they could see how this would work. I hope this makes sense. Any advice on where to find help on this would be greatly appreciated. If its made with someone elses help I need to be able to update it efficiently on my own without having to rely on another person down the road. I'd appreciate general feedback on the idea as well. Let me know if this is crazy but I really think this could benefit students greatly. Especially current high school students who are rediculously tech savvy.

Posted: Apr 14 2009 01:58 pm

Hmmm... your best bet might be Wordpress.

It will take some work to setup, but it is very customizable and there should be add-ons that do all or most of the stuff you are looking to do. The good news is that once it is setup, it will be very user-friendly and easy to update.

Posted: Apr 14 2009 02:12 pm

Learning HTML and CSS would help, too. It's not hard, you'll learn the basics in an hour or two.

You might also want to check PHP-Fusion and Joomla. I'm not sure if that's exactly what you want, but there's a crapload of add-ons for each one, so you might find what you want easily.

Oh, and here's a quick and fun HTML/CSS tutorial that'll get you up and running in an hour or so.

http://www.subcide.com/tutorials/csslayout/index.aspx

Just make sure you don't use Notepad, it tends to fuck up your site encoding. If you're on Unix, Vi or Emacs are the way to go, if you're willing to spend a few minutes learning them. They have Windows ports, but I haven't tested them.

Joined: Dec 06 2007 Location: Connecticut Posts: 11244

I charge $125/hr for web programming & administration. I can offer upwards of 10 hours per week. I'll just have to dump a cheesy purple and green side project I work on.

In all seriousness though, Wordpress with a predefined theme would be the second easiest thing you could do. Blogger would be the easiest.