It all depends on what sort of site you want to make and how you want to make it. In general, you're going to need extended access to a computer, a bit of spare time, a bit of patience and an idea.

At the easy end of the scale, there are facilities on-line for posting your own pictures and a few short bits of text, which are very simple to use, but give you very little control over how the outcome is presented. You can find such facilities on Yahoo, MSN and many of the big famous portal sites out there on the web. Establishing your own community involves little more than filling in an online form, downloading a picture formatting tool and following the instructions to upload your photos and label them.

To make TEFL-magic, on the other hand has taken me over a month of seventy-hour weeks.This is my first real site, by the way, so I am by no means an expert. With this one, I have taken a slightly harder route than perhaps I had to, because I've set my heart on learning all about web design and so writing a whole site in raw HTML code seemed like something I ought to have experience of. A far easier method would have been to use one of the many "web-authoring" software packages that make (basic) web authoring only a little harder than operating a word processor. These programs include Microsoft Front Page, Macromedia Dreamweaver, and at the slightly lower end of the market, Adobe Pagemill, Microsoft Front Page Express and Netscape Composer, the latter of which you can get free when you install the full version of Netscape Communicator (although that may be difficult to get hold of these days). For links to the various companies concerned, see the web design links page.

If you want do it the hard (but satisfying) way there are various web sites that provide an excellent introduction to writing HTML code. These are written by professionals with years of web authoring experience and who are much better qualified than I am to be lead you through the maze. Provided you're not a one-fingered typist (like I was) you could have a pleasant-looking, fully functional site in a matter of days. Once again, take a look at some of the links on the web design links page.

For teacher training courses, English courses in Bristol UK and free interactive exercises, visit The Language Project Website.