I have a few friends with children that have special needs. There are an amazing amount of resources out there for parents that would like help. I happen to recently stumble upon the about.com page on autism websites.
Type “autism” into Google, and you’ll find 17,700,000 references. Ready to check them all out? Hopefully, your answer is NO! In fact, though, many parents spend unending hours surfing the Net, hoping to find the one site that will make a difference. Before you find yourself surfing the web at 4 a.m., check out these top ten sites. All of them are reliable and readable, with links to plenty of specialized services and related organizations.
There are millions of resources available on any topic you can imagine. Knowing which sites are reliable is a task all in itself. Additionally you can’t trust the metrics of the site – just the fact that a site gets a lot of hits doesn’t make it the best source of information.
One of my methods to find good sites is to use ‘prescreened sites’. Check out sites that have been listed by your favorite organizations. Sometimes it’s good to just refine your search also. The more specific your search the more relevant the results. One topic that I was interested in was speech delay so while looking for information I searched speech delay autism. That took the millions of results down to about 500,000. As I add terms it narrows the results – and almost every result in the beginning of the list were results I was interested in.
My next search was ‘autism app iphone reviews’ – This came up with 3.4 million results. A lot of results, but looking through the list they all seems to be worth looking into. I added speech delay to the search and found several great apps right away….