To improve interaction, you may need to enforce newsgroup participation, or post each email message to the newsgroup. This gets students used to seeing their questions in public, similar to the classroom. Try not to duplicate the content of web pages with equivalent postings to the course newsgroup, except in situations where availability is questionable. This means that some material may be available on the website, some on the newsgroup, and a few items on both. Duplication of too much content between the website and the newsgroup may cause reliance on one medium versus the other.
Web pages work very well as long as the network is available.
The Tulane campus network occasionally has some problems. Students get frustrated in the classroom when things crash or go down. It also disrupts the learning process. Having students email or post links to their completed projects helps tremendously with grading, without imposing more effort on the students than they are used to. Creating HTML documents for course materials isn't too difficult, even without pre-existing slides.