When we first had access to the internet there seemed little of interest to children. Schools weren’t doing much and we were introduced to sites such as the Cats Protection League, with some funny pictures of cats on it, and the BBC had a few things.

So I started to create our own website in my spare time, partly because we hadn’t any money for textbooks. The first thing I wrote was a section on authors. I watched how the children used it - they used a worksheet to find out information and found the answers.

We began to realise that the internet could be a valuable resource. We wanted to use it in an imaginative way - not to mention governors or Ofsted. I wanted it to be for the children, not to advertise the school.

The autumn term project in 1999 for the upper end of the school was on the Aztecs. So I took the QCA scheme, modified it and wrote the Aztec part of the site for our topic work. Over the next two years, every topic that came up for Years 3 to 6 - the Tudors, the Victorians, India - I wrote a website section.

At first, we just had it working on our network, I had no idea about putting it out on to the world wide web. But when we did set it up, we were impressed when people started looking at it. I adapt the site according to the reaction I get from the children and teachers.

We even managed to get the Aztec site translated into Spanish. A guy in Mexico City, who’d been looking at it, wanted to use it for his children, so he volunteered to translate it. The same happened with Ancient Greece - someone in Greece volunteered.

Today, there are 2,000 pages on the site. We only track visits to 35 of them because it’s expensive to do. In one day, recently, we had more than 3,000 hits on the Aztec site alone. We also get a few hundred emails a day - and not just from children. We’ve had education ministers from Australia writing in, and archbishops and professors. And we have won several awards. The one we enjoyed receiving the most was from Yell.com - Learn UK beat us but we beat the BBC. We accepted the award at a Bafta-style champagne reception.

Our website’s success has surprised us - after all, we’re just a little primary school in Yorkshire. We do nothing to publicise it - it just keeps on growing. When I started it, I knew two people who lived abroad - my aunt in Canada and my cousin in France. I couldn’t count the number now.

We did think of asking users to pay for parts that would be of use to UK teachers. I had so many replies from people who saw it as free, so in the spirit of the internet, I thought we’d rather stay free and keep our friends.

Derek Allen is head of Snaith primary school near Selby. He was talking to Martin Whittaker.Snaith’s site is at:www.snaithprimary.eril.net