As I expected, building a website is not easy, at least not for someone with no previous experience of doing so and with no-one to teach them! here follows a brief summary of where I am at with it, and where I am eventually likely to end up with it, one day!
I decided not to take the simplest option of employing someone to build it for me as I wanted to be able to update the design and content on a regular basis. I felt that to be able to do so I would need to understand how the website was built in the first place.
The next simplest option would have been to use a web building site such as Wix or Go Daddy. However, my research had suggested that it would be good to include certain content and in a particular format, which did not seem to be possible using those platforms.
I also wanted the safeguard of being able to easily move the website from one web host to another if for any reason that became necessary. It did not look like it would be easy to move website from those building platforms, so I rules those out as an option.
So, I arrived at WordPress, which seemed to have the framework I was looking for to include the content that my research suggested needed to be added to make the project worthwhile. WordPress is also easily moved from one web host to another, or at least that is what is claimed!
So that I did not embarrass myself by having a poorly designed website visible to the world whilst I taught myself how to to do it, I decided that initially I would build it on my local host. Basically, I build it on my laptop and hosted it only across my home WiFi network.
This is allowing me to play with the design, and check how it appears across a range of devices, as though it was actually live on the internet. However, the whole thing is taking me rather longer than I had anticipated and with lockdown ending tomorrow, is still not finished.
Hopefully, at some point I will find the time to finish this project. It will be interesting to see how it looks, and how it compares with other driving instruction websites. It may not end up being the best website in the world, but it will be a little piece of me!
So, the website will not be published tomorrow, but I will be out there teaching people to drive again, helping them to do so safely, and pass their driving tests. Currently I have had six pupils take their tests this year, and all six have passed, which is a fantastic 100% record for 2020 so far.
Let us all hope this is the last we see of lockdown, although I strongly suspect it will not be. At least if we do have a further lockdown I will have something to do, which will be to try and get this website build finished and the content up to date.