If you want to develop a website for your school or governor organisation but have little or no experience, then here's the place to start.

At a very basic level, websites are made up of pages.  These are text files, formatted in a particular way called the HyperText Markup Language (HTML).  To produce very basic web pages all you need is HTML and it looks a bit like this:

Here's the HTML:

<h1>This is a heading</h1>

<p>And this is some more text</p>

and this is what that looks like in a web page:

This is a heading

And this is some more text

Web pages run on Web servers which is what you point you Web browser at by setting the address (www.moltenweb.co.uk for example).  If you're making a website you'll need to write Web pages and have a Web server to put them on.  Our local authority here in Norfolk (UK) provides each school with a web server which it can upload it's web pages to.  I'd hope other (most?) local authorities do likewise.  If your authority doesn't see "web hosting" elsewhere on this site.

Everything else on the Web is really just building on this basic premise.  To learn everything worth knowing about HTML (and lots of other things) go to W3 Schools - www.w3schools.com.  On W3 Schools, you'll also find out about the following things which are are used in the more sophisticated examples on this site.

• CSS - Cascading Style Sheets.  These allow you to have a better control over how your website looks and splits content (i.e. the pages you write) from how they look.  It's a bit of a geeky thing but it makes maintaining sites much easier.
• Javascript.  This is  a programming language which allows you to do more interactive things such as animations or (in some cases) buttons being pressed and the like.  Javascript runs in the Web browser.
• PHP.  This is another programming language but, in contrast to Javascript which runs in the browser, PHP runs on the server and dynamically generates HTML.  You probably won't need to use PHP unless you start doing pretty sophisticated things but Joomla (which you'll see described elsewhere on this site) is written in PHP.