A few Ironton High School seniors may deserve their own Web address at www.helpinghand.com.

It has been a long time coming, but the city of Ironton has finally made the jump to the World Wide Web thanks to the help of the eleven students.

IHS teacher Beth Anderson's interactive media class spent months building an official Web site for the city and presented the project to the Ironton City Council Thursday.

Expected to be placed online this week, the city agreed to pay $35 per year for the URL address www.ironton-ohio.com. OU will provide a server free of charge.

Council thanked the students for all their hard work.

"I am thrilled to death to see this," said Councilman Richard Price. "Since I first came on to council, I tried to get a Web site. It seemed impossible."

The home page has a welcome letter from the mayor. From there, visitors can link to pages focusing on government, education, business, history, recreation, churches, a city map and more.

Each of these pages provide pictures and important information about the city, such as business listings, the city charter, a government office phone number directory and local links of interest.

"We tried to put in everything that would be interesting or valuable to the people of the city and to people interested in visiting Ironton," Anderson said.

Along with the rest of council, Councilman Brent Pyles was impressed.

"This is long overdue for the city of Ironton," he said. "It is certainly a great representation of what the city has to offer."

After taking home second place at a competition at Shawnee State University earlier this year, the students recently won first place in web design at OUS' Electronic Media Moving Image Excellence Awards competition.