Let me make it clear that I am not an expert in any sense of the word at building web pages.  I still have a lot to learn.  But it doesn't take much knowledge at all to make a nice site to serve your purposes.  Below are a couple of things to consider when developing your page.

Displaying Student Work

A web page is a great way to display what your students are working on.   You can take pictures of the work, scan in the work, or take digital pictures of it.  If the work is done on the computer such as in hyperstudio, you can directly upload it to your site.  Students are often excited to see their work on the internet.  There are also many online projects you can do, often in cooperation with classrooms in different states.  

You will have to decide if you will display pictures of your students based on your school's policy and the wishes of the parents.  I don't recommend placing clear pictures of your students on the internet.

Communicating With Parents

Using your web page to communicate with parents depends on their access to the internet, a big problem in some districts.  But if the parents do have access to the web, you have a great tool.  Not only can you display the parents work, you can display current events at the school(PTA, plays, lunch menu, etc...) and have a guestbook where parents can leave comments about the work.  The ambitious ones can even provide a live video feed of the classroom with security to parents at home or work so they can see what is going on.  Again, you would have to check with your school's policy and receive permission from parents.  Check out my Internet Safety Guide for more information on the internet and school policy.

To Be or Not To Be

How you build your page is obviously up to you, but there are a couple of things you should do and should not do.

To Be

Make your site easy to navigate.  It is a good idea to provide a navigation bar such as the one at the top of this page.

Place access to the juicy parts of your site on the front page, but don't place everything there.  A general rule is to not make the first page longer than two screens in length.

Not To Be

DO NOT embed a midi into the front page of your web site.  While you may really like the song, your visitors may not.  But more importantly, a page that loads and plays a song automatically often brings the visitor's machine to a meltdown.  Many times they will close the site before it loads completely and curse you while they wait for their machine to recover.  Give your visitors the choice of listening to the song or not by placing a button to the song on your page.

Don't place too many graphics on one page, unless the graphics are crucial to the information you are offering.  Use just a couple of nice pretty graphics to liven up your page.

Use Java Scripts sparingly and only in cases where it is needed.  Java can also bring a computer to a halt.  By all means avoid the script that scrolls useless text at the bottom of the browser window.