''Communication is something that I've always worked on, but I've never had the proper tools,'' said Cheryl Flood, who has been the school's director for more than 20 years. ''I feel like maybe now I'm finally getting there.''

That is because the school has given every pair of teachers digital cameras and installed computers with Internet connections in each of its 10 classrooms.

Its new online presence was engineered by Crossbow Media, which specializes in making Web content easy to manage and update.

Crossbow and other Web site builders in Westchester are using newer and cheaper technology to tap into the power of the World Wide Web.

''There's a market for this now, as people get comfortable with the Internet,'' said Andrew Lehman, a founder of Crossbow, based in Rye. Advances in speed, access and public confidence in the last five years have made it easier for small businesses to take advantage of the Web's potential, he said.

The technology underlying Crossbow was initially developed in England for online medical training, said Cliff Came, who founded the company with Mr. Lehman two and a half years ago. Crossbow's owners were originally approached to help market the product, then called Titco, but wound up buying the company instead.

''What Cliff and I decided was, we realized that when the bubble burst there were going to be some really good technologies that were out there, that were available,'' Mr. Lehman said, referring to the dot-com crash. ''We were able to find a company that fit the bill.''

Anyone can learn the system in a short time, Mr. Came said, because owners of a Crossbow-created Web site can change the information essentially just as they would edit a word processor document.

''We make it possible for somebody to go in and change the content,'' Mr. Lehman said, ''and there's no chance they're going to make a mistake and their Web site won't work.'' The company stores every version of a client's Web pages, so if necessary, any change can always be reversed.

RYE Presbyterian Nursery's setup will allow teachers to post calendars, weekly newsletters, pictures of art projects and audio recordings of conversations. Parents will have passwords, and at whim can check on information related to their children.

Crossbow's smallest service package, which covers three users, normally costs $39.95 a month. But the company donated the nursery school's package as a contribution to the school's capital campaign. Crossbow has three pricing levels: the basic package of $39.95 a month; a middle tier of $249 a month; and a top level of $2,000 to $3,000 a month, depending upon the number of users and the sophistication of the site, usually for large corporations with complex, custom needs. The company does not provide the computer space for the live version of its clients' Web sites, which may cost about $15 a month for storage and for 15 e-mail addresses for smaller businesses, Mr. Came said.

''We have some very sophisticated teachers, and we have other teachers who are just beginning,'' Ms. Flood said. Learning how to use the Web ''is giving us all new skills, and an excitement and joy in teaching, that help us stay on the cutting edge,'' she said.

The Rye Free Reading Room, which had a Web site that was cumbersome to update, began using a Crossbow system last month, said Betty Gay Teoman, library director. Under the old system, all requests for changes had to be sent in batches to the county's central library system, where specialists would make revisions.

''It was more effective for everybody to have people who were technically knowledgeable, who did that as a major part of their job, than for one of us who's doing a lot of other things to suddenly sit down and pick up that very technical aspect of Web site maintenance,'' Ms. Teoman said. But with the new system in place, local library staff members and part-time volunteers can edit the site at their convenience.

Kristi Strangeland, who has been in business as a Web designer for three years and runs Mustang Web Designs in Hastings-on-Hudson, says that small businesses, as a matter of credibility, are increasingly seeking to have a Web presence.

As a result of the demand, last month she began offering a service that allows her clients to have a ready-made site running within a few hours. A custom Web site, optimized to be search-engine friendly and without any databases, would cost between $4,000 and $8,000, depending upon the number of pages involved, she said. The template-based ''express sites'' cost a flat fee of $95 a month, she said, including an hour of maintenance.

''It's really for these small companies that feel like it's a business card,'' she said.

Rick Berlin, owner of Berlin Productions, a multimedia design house in White Plains, says he has found that technology improvements have allowed him to take on customers he would have been too busy to deal with previously. His company creates Web sites and a variety of marketing graphics, both electronic and print.

Berlin Productions recently designed a site intended to help reduce drug abuse nationwide among teenage girls for Intersystems Inc., a Manhattan-based company that develops and tests substance-abuse prevention programs. The Web site, which is in the process of enrolling about 400 girls for a clinical trial, will be the first of its kind, said Traci Schwinn, a manager at Intersystems.

Several years ago, Mr. Berlin said, he was interested only in dealing with companies that were large enough to be listed among the Fortune 500.

''After the dot-com meltdown and after 9/11 and everything, things ended up getting a little -- a lot -- harder,'' he said. But he made up for it by shifting the focus to include more moderate-size companies, he said.

That shift in focus is made possible, he said, because new technology and experience allow him to produce the same quality results more quickly and more cost effectively.

A minute of animation that previously took four or five machines to produce can now be done on one computer, he said. Digital video clips that used to cost $20,000 to create can now be made for $800 to $1,200, he said.

''We're able to serve clients at a lower rate,'' he said. ''There's no need to turn a lower Web site away anymore.''