I went on holiday for a short break in Great Yarmouth from Monday, 28th August 2000 to Friday, 1st September 2000. On Wednesday, 30th August 2000, I visited Norwich for what has been to date, the only time in my life. That morning, I caught the train at Great Yarmouth and spent the day in Norwich. During the Yarmouth and Norwich break, I started thinking about what I should put on my website. The ideas I developed during that week were my behavioural and psychological history, my personal details, how I came to be diagnosed, the history of Autism and the history of Asperger's Syndrome.
In September and October 2000, I grew quite frustrated, due to the fact that I had the ideas and knew what I wanted to write, but didn't know how to design a website. A week before Christmas, the frustration came to an end when I saw the Lillian Hobbs book "Designing Internet Home Pages Made Simple" (2nd Edition) in my town's central library. I learned much of the HTML jargon from this.
To any beginner who is thinking of designing their own website and knows nothing about HTML, this is the one book I would recommend. I borrowed it and spent the final month of 2000 and the first three weeks of 2001 learning HTML. Nowadays, of course, HTML is very antiquated in the ever changing world of information technology and web design, but it still remains useful if you are starting from the beginning. It definitely was useful at the time, and even now, I owe it a big thanks.
I commenced work on my website on Tuesday, 30th January 2001. Choosing a title was a problem. I thought to myself, "Shall I call it Kevin's Asperger's Syndrome Site?". Then however, I thought, "Well, what if another man with Kevin is diagnosed with Asperger's, and decides to design a website? People would get confused, and that would be counterproductive". I thought about using "Kevin Phillips' Asperger's Syndrome site", but then of course, there is the soccer player who has the same name as me. He was at the height of his fame in January 2001, and people may have thought, "Oh I didn't know he had Asperger's Syndrome. It hasn't affected his football anyway", so I decided to invoke my full name and simply use the initials.
I beavered and toiled away at my website throughout February, March and April 2001, so it took up much of my spare time. However, finally, on Friday, 4th May 2001, the general body of my website was completed, from the ideas I conceived in Great Yarmouth and Norwich just over eight months before. I proofread it for spelling errors, grammatical errors and mistakes on Tuesday, 8th May, Wednesday, 9th May and Thursday, 10th May 2001. I submitted it to the Internet on Monday, 21st May 2001 and my website was finally launched on the Internet on Tuesday, 29th May 2001. My guest book was signed for the first ever time on Saturday 7th July 2001. Of course, the website has changed and has been revamped since 2001, but the skeleton of it, if you like, has still remained, and my site is still running to this day, as you can see by reading this page!
I acknowledge that social media and Facebook has vastly reduced the impact of my website. You have to understand what a different world we lived in when I designed this website in January to May 2001. There was no Facebook, no Twitter, no you tube, no TikTok, no Instagram or Snapchat. My Space hadn't started yet. Our way of communicating was via Microsoft Windows or email. Numerous forums have come about where AS and Autism is discussed. On Facebook alone, there are numerous Autism and Asperger's Syndrome support pages and groups, and individuals can meet others with AS or any other condition or disability, my website still receives the occasional guestbook signing. Despite this decline, I still receive the occasional email asking for advice or commenting on my website. If I still receive the occasional email, if the guestbook on my website records the occasional signing, whether it is days or weeks apart, then my website is still fulfilling the purpose of why I set it up, back then, and my experiences have not been for nothing, and my advice or help is not being wasted. I hope that I have helped people when this website has been in existence. If I have then it has not been for nothing.
