I thought about paying someone to put this site together, but in the end I chose not to. It has therefore taken a lot longer to see the light and, if I put anything like a sensible price on my time, cost a lot more. But I think it is worth it. I did, though, get a lot of valuable help.

Websites need to do four things well:

• content—the words and pictures
• visual design—the page layout, colour scheme, typefaces, etc, that make it easy to absorb the content
• information structure—the organisation and navigation/search structure that makes it easy to find the content you want to see
• infrastructure—the software that manages the content and serves up the right item when it is requested, and makes it easy to add, delete and update content.

The infrastructure for this website is Joomla, an open-source (ie, free to download) content management system that has proved remarkably easy to install and customise. But I got a great start from Joomla! A User’s Guide by Barrie North. Barrie’s JoomlaShack website is also well worth a visit.

You get a lot with Joomla straight out of the box, but if there is some feature you need that is not provided, there are thousands of extensions and plug-ins to do this, that and anything else you can imagine. And if you can’t find precisely what you want, it is not too hard to write your own Joomla plug-in. I wanted an ability to create links, both internal to this site and external, in a quick and simple way, much like one creates links in Wikipedia. Sooner or later I will write some documentation and offer my plugin for downloading. Likewise, a few default behaviours of Joomla were not exactly what I wanted, so I delved under the bonnet (Americans, read “hood”) to tinker with Joomla’s source code, usually only changing a single line to achieve the desired result. These too I will document in due course.

The visual design of the site is down to John Isitt and his crew at Resonant Media, who crafted a whole new brand and image package for me. I think it looks really cool and there are several subtleties they have captured and I enjoy. I needed to scratch my head a bit to get the CSS code to reproduce the design faithfully, but that was all part of the learning. The photographs of yours truly were taken by Sarah Smith whose patience and skill have produced great results—always use a professional for website images that matter. The tie was £15 from M&S and the white shirt was an old one. Unfortunately, I no longer have the receipt, or I would be reclaiming the VAT!

I take full responsibility for the content and its structure, but Joomla makes it easy to play around and get it right. Thanks go to several friends and colleagues whose comments proved invaluable in the final tuning of the site: Jim Bosley, John Chaldecott, Steve Galatis, Mike Hayes, Linda Linehan and Philippe Muheim.

That does not mean that I am finished! Your feedback about this site, positive and especially negative, would be very welcome.