There’s a big difference between what we find on the internet and the sites we visit by choice and what we’d want our children to see at school or home regardless of their age. Into the middle of this falls filtering software. You may have chosen to install and use it in your own home or your child’s school may use it whether you are aware of the fact or not.

ICRA, the Internet Content Rating Association, is part of the Family Online Safety Institute which is a non-profit organization of internet leaders working to develop a safer internet. ICRA provides a free service that allows a web site owner to label his or her own site. This label can then be read by filtering software and a site displayed or not depending on the user’s settings, thereby protecting children from inappropriate content. ICRA does not actually rate the content of a site, the site’s owner does that.

Why would you want to rate your own site? Well, as a content provider, and a Mom, there is some information on my site that might be of use to a young adult. There are plenty of kid’s in school learning web design or doing other projects that could use one of our freebies or solve some problem based on one of our Tech Talk posts and if I didn’t rate my own site, the filtering software may reject it because of a lack of a label. That takes my entire site out of the eyes of who knows how many schools and homes. I don’t want that to happen. So, I labeled my site.

It comes right down this simple question, why not label it? If there’s nothing inappropriate on your site, why take it out of the eyes of who knows how many possible visitors? If your site does contain something inappropriate for children, why take the chance of angering a parent, school, community, ISP, etc. Just label the site and let the world know that you are a considerate and concerned web site owner.

All of our newly designed web sites are ICRA labeled without any additional cost. We consider it part of our design packages. If you have a site already and would like it labeled, just ask.