I thought I’d sit down and write a little diary-style update about building the Hagg Hill Weekender website, mainly because it feels only fair to be honest about the process.

In short: it has been a journey.
In longer form: I am spectacularly rubbish at websites 💻✨

I genuinely believed this would be a “quick job”. A few pages, a couple of buttons, maybe a calendar if I was feeling bold. What I didn’t factor in was accidentally publishing the entire site, losing pages, finding them again, losing them again, and discovering that the phrase “just add a form” is actually a threat in disguise 😅

I am not a web developer. I am not techy. I do not enjoy being told to copy and paste mysterious code into places I cannot see. What I am is neurodivergent, optimistic, and wildly confident about how long things will take until reality gently taps me on the shoulder and says “nope”.

There have been moments of genuine pride — like when a button worked 🎉 — immediately followed by moments of panic when that same button somehow removed half the menu. I’ve stared at the screen thinking, how do people do this for a living? and then remembered that people who do this for a living probably don’t try to do it while also running events, wrangling land, and needing a cup of tea every 12 minutes ☕🌱

Emotionally, it’s been a rollercoaster. I’ve gone from confident to confused to convinced I’ve broken the internet, then back to confident again, all before lunch. At one point I couldn’t find my tabs and genuinely questioned every life decision that led me to WordPress. There was also a calendar. We don’t talk about the calendar anymore. It tried its best. I tried my best. We were not compatible 📅💔

But joking aside, I do want to say this part clearly — I’m actually really pleased with what I’ve created.

Not because it’s perfect or polished or technically impressive, but because it feels true. It sounds like me. It reflects what Hagg Hill Weekender is about: honesty, inclusion, learning as we go, and building something human-sized with care. Every page has been thought about, rewritten, questioned, and shaped with intention, even when I had absolutely no idea what I was doing technically.

I could have made the website sound slicker. I could have hidden the fact that this is the first year or pretended I know exactly what I’m doing. But that wouldn’t feel right. Hagg Hill Weekender isn’t about pretending — it’s about creating spaces where people can show up as they are, and this website does that too. It’s a bit handmade, a bit chaotic, and very much built in real time 🌿

The website is still a work in progress and probably always will be. It will change, improve, get clearer, and almost certainly break again at some point. And that’s okay. This whole project is a learning year — the land is evolving, the events are evolving, and I’m evolving too (slowly, with snacks).

If you’ve landed here and thought, oh good, this feels real, then I’m glad. And if you’ve landed here and thought, thank god I’m not the only one who struggles with this stuff, then even better 💛

Right. I’m off to add one tiny thing, which will somehow affect five other things, and then reward myself with a cup of tea. If the website is still standing afterwards, we’ll call it a win ☕✨

Peace, love and light 🌈