If anyone suggests to you that in this day and age of drag and drop even a novice can build a website, don’t believe them. Run away. Run away very quickly.

I spent over a year agonising about whether or not to build a website to show and (hopefully) sell my photographs. Maybe my Flickr and Instagram accounts would be sufficient? After all, who looks at websites these days in the age of social media? I heard all sorts of stories about photographers who had enjoyed great success simply by pushing their profile on Instagram. Stories of how the bright young things who commission and buy fine art today never give a thought to looking anywhere other than Instagram. But then I’m old fashioned and having a website was beginning to feel like a bit of a status symbol. So I decided I could not call myself a proper photographer until I had a website. Perhaps that was a gross act of hubris.

I spoke to a lot of photographer friends and looked at a number of website builders. Too many to remember now. I had an abortive attempt at building a website several years ago using the Wordpress blog tool after somebody convinced me that’s all I needed. After several weeks I’d succeeded in posting two photographs. This time it would be different.

After a lot of prevarication I narrowed my choices down to Squarespace and Wordpress’ Beaver Builder (!) A friend and fellow photographer at The Photographers Studio, who has built many websites for his clients, convinced me that as a novice to this I should probably avoid Wordpress. It’s an incredibly powerful and flexible tool but the templates in Squarespace would probably be a more sensible choice for a numpty.

So began the journey that resulted in the very website you are looking at. I’ve got to say it wasn’t a pleasant journey. I’d rather have gone to Cleethorpes. After about 15 hours I’d managed to load about 20 photographs and screw up the templates entirely. But I’ve achieved something. I’m not sure what exactly, but I’ve achieved something.