LissaExplains.com is a

Web site A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Wikipe ...

created by Alyssa "Lissa" Daniels (born 1986), a girl from

Orlando, Florida Orlando () is a city in the U.S. state of Florida and is the county seat of Orange County, Florida, Orange County. In Central Florida, it is the center of the Greater Orlando, Orlando metropolitan area, which had a population of 2,509,831, acco ...

, to teach people, especially children, how to make their own Web sites. She was 11 years old when she set up the first site in 1997, and is currently a university junior in Florida. Her site has taught many people how to create a Web site by writing their own

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

without the use of Web page creators. The web site includes tutorials and an

internet forum An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporar ...

History

Daniels had trouble remembering all of the

codes that she needed to create her site, so she created a page which listed HTML codes. Eventually, more people noticed this page, and as she got more requests for the

URL A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed as a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifie ...

, she decided she would make the site public, first publishing it at GeoCities. When she was 12 years old in 1998, she decided to purchase a domain name for her site, and renamed the site "Lissa Explains it All". Daniels was approached in August 1999 by Ronald L. Wagner, columnist for ''

The Dallas Morning News ''The Dallas Morning News'' is a daily newspaper serving the Dallas–Fort Worth area of Texas, with an average print circulation of 65,369. It was founded on October 1, 1885 by Alfred Horatio Belo as a satellite publication of the ''Galvesto ...

''. He had seen her site online and wanted to feature her and her site in his weekly column, "Family PC Fun". The article was published on September 26, 1999. At the time, her site was using large amounts of bandwidth and the monthly hosting cost for her site was beginning to be too expensive for her to keep it online. She discussed this with Wagner, who suggested that she contact a few Internet advertising agencies to see if they would like to advertise on her site. She was accepted by one agency, and soon started earning enough money through advertising to keep Lissa Explains it All online. By summer 2000, her site was receiving over 500,000 hits a month. In June 2000,

CNN Headline News HLN is an American basic cable network. Owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, the network primarily carries true crime programming. The channel was originally launched on January 1, 1982 by Turner Broadcasting as CNN2 (later renamed Headline News ...

aired a story about her and the website. The

CNN CNN (Cable News Network) is a multinational cable news channel headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. Founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld as a 24-hour cable news channel, and presently owned by the M ...

show ''Science and Technology'' also aired a story about her and her site in July 2000."Whiz kid Web Designer"
, ''

'', July 14, 2000. Daniels later added a forum to her site because of the large volume of email she received. The forum allowed her visitors to get answers to the many questions they had. Lissa's HTML help forum had over 75,000 members, but due to a hard drive failure with site backups that occurred in August 2007, was offline for almost two years. The forums were reinstalled on 3 July 2009, but later went down again and are currently not available. While the forums are not available, the tutorial sections of the site are still online.

References

{{reflist

External links

Lissa Explains it All
American educational websites