Can websites contain viruses? Unfortunately, yes, and they can spread to your computer if you’re not careful.
Depending on the strength of your antivirus software, you may be alerted and your access blocked when visiting an infected site. But sometimes the software delivers a false positive. So, is the site I want to visit safe or not?
You can get a qualified second opinion using a free tool called URLVoid. From their homepage, enter the address of the site you want to check, then click the Scan Now button. URLVoid will check the suspicious website with 19 web scanner services, including McAfee SiteAdvisor, Norton SafeWeb, and Web Security Guard. It will then present you with the compiled results. Impressive!
If you are teaching online or otherwise assigning online content as part of your course, URLVoid seems like a good bet for checking sites in advance. You might also consider setting up a wiki or similar resource where you and fellow teachers can pool respective lists of suspicious sites revealed by this scanning tool.