Once you've found a suitable host, just follow their instructions, and you should have your own web space within a few minutes. Freeservers (and most other free web space providers) place a banner at the top of every page (look at the top of this one for an example) from which they make their money.

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Creating a Web Page

2. Once you've done that, you need to put something on it. There are a lot of tutorials about HTML (the language you need to create web pages - try 'HTML tutorial' in the above search engine) but you don't really need to know much about it if you use 'FrontPage Express' (the HTML editor bundled free with Microsoft's 'Internet Explorer'). It's much like creating a document with 'Word', only with fewer conveniences! There are a lot of other HTML editors on the market, but FrontPage has served my purposes so far - it depends, I suppose, how ambitious you get! I should also give credit here to: Microsoft's FrontPage 2000 (great but pricey and a bit large!), Dreamweaver from Macromedia (an absolute dream, top of the range, easy, intuitive, best I've tried, but a nightmare price!), Spider writer (nice, and a bit nearer my budget, with a functional FTP client program built in)

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Creating Exercises for the Web

For this you need to download some software. Half-Baked Software have created a suite of programs designed to create web-based exercises, particularly for EFL students, but they could be easily adapted to other subjects. They are called 'Hot Potatoes', and are available from: http://www.halfbakedsoftware.com . The suite, which is free as long as the pages created are freely available to all, consists of the following programs:

JBC: multiple-choice or true-false quizzes
JQuiz: text-entry or short-answer quizzes
JCloze: gap-fill exercises
JCross: crosswords
JMix: jumbled-sentence exercises
JMatch: matching and ordering exercises

It comes bundled with a tutorial on how to use it. If you've used any CALL software before, you should find this pretty straightforward. They also have a new interactive maze program, Quandry, which you can try, but costs if you want the full version (see examples)

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'Uploading' to the Web

You should now have some pages, and some exercises to put on the web ('uploading' is transferring from your computer to the server, downloading is the reverse). To transfer them you need an FTP program. FTP stands for 'file transfer protocol' and an FTP program  is used to transfer the pages you've created on your computer to the server where you have web space. Once it's on the server, anyone with access to the internet, and the address where your page is stored, can look at it. (make sure you refresh before uploading, and remember what you call your files, 'xyz.html' is a different file from 'xyz.htm'; usually your 'home' page ahs to be called 'index.htm' or 'index.html' or 'default.htm'). I still recommend Bulletproof as the best FTP transfer program. It is shareware, with a 30 day limitation, after which you have to pay $30 to keep using it. You can download the shareware version (or another FTP client program) from www.tucows.com

That's about it. It's a matter of trial and error; as you can see in my case, mostly error! If I can do it, you can! There is a surprising lack of good EFL material on the web (although this is changing fast), and an ever larger number of students using it, so good luck and get cracking!

If you have any comments / specific difficulties, or if you succeed and want me to include you in my list of links, please email me: webmaster@efllinks.freeservers.com

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