Ramalley Pre-School

The first website I was paid to build. I was 15. My mum was the client. Comic Sans was a design decision. It's here on the portfolio as a reminder of where this started.

TL;DR

A brochure site for Ramalley Pre-School in Chandlers Ford, Hampshire. Built in 2005 in Microsoft FrontPage, saved directly over WebDAV onto the hosting box, HTML frames, a sprinkle of ASP Classic for the dynamic bits, and one "CLICK HERE TO ENTER" splash page because of course there was one.

The client was my mum. She ran the pre-school. She paid me £100. The domain was my dad's, kxlan.co.uk/ramalley/, which is why the only surviving copy is on the Wayback Machine.

How I ended up writing ASP at 15

My dad was in software. I'd taught myself Visual Basic at around 8, poking at .frm files in VB6 until things drew on screen and clicked. When the Ramalley job came up seven years later, ASP Classic was just VBScript with <% %> around it, so it wasn't a stack change so much as a venue change.

FrontPage was the house editor. Save a page in FrontPage, it published straight over WebDAV to the live server. No git, no deploy pipeline, no build step. The dev loop was: edit, save, refresh the browser. Fast, and exactly as safe as it sounds.

What was on the site

Looking at the Archive.org capture:

• Splash page with a "CLICK HERE TO ENTER" link. Load-bearing.
• Home, welcome copy, opening times, a Google Maps iframe once they became a thing.
• About us, Contact us, Links, frame-swapped static pages.
• Parents Login, a gated area.
• Request prospectus form.
• Gallery, file-system-driven.
• Quotes, rendered from a text file, alternating left/right on the page.

Banner in Comic Sans. Blue background, red accents, white text. Children's pre-school. It fit.

The ASP bits

Not much of it was dynamic, but the parts that were:

• Parents Login was a hard-coded password check in ASP. It gated a small parents-only area. By modern standards a <input type="password"> on its own HTML page is roughly the same thing.
• Request prospectus was a classic ASP form handler, the kind that emailed my mum when a parent filled it in.
• Gallery was the bit I remember least clearly but is the one a 2005-me would have been most proud of: images in a directory, captions in a companion text file, ASP walking the directory with Scripting.FileSystemObject and rendering the grid on the fly. Add a JPEG, update a line in the text file, gallery updates. No CMS, but effectively a deploy-by-FTP CMS.
• Quotes lived in a text file and alternated left-and-right on the page as ASP looped through them. That alternation was the cool trick I still remember writing.

None of this was technically impressive, then or now. It worked, it shipped, and a small business in Hampshire used it for years.

Deploy, such as it was

FrontPage  -->  WebDAV  -->  kxlan.co.uk
   ^
   |
  Save

That was the whole pipeline. FrontPage's "Publish" wrote changes straight over WebDAV. There was no staging environment. If you broke the home page, the home page was broken. If you wanted to roll back, you opened the file you'd just saved and remembered what used to be there.

What the site taught me

• Shipping matters more than elegance. The thing I'm proudest of from this era isn't the code, it's that it was live, running, and serving an actual business for years. Lots of code I write today isn't.
• Text files are a real data format. The gallery and quotes loaders were the first time I'd built something that read data at runtime rather than hard-coding it into the page. Once you've done that, you've basically had the CMS idea.
• There is no framework lock-in when you're 15. Everything since has been a variation on "edit this, reload the browser, see what happens."

The A-Level sequel that never shipped

A couple of years later, as A-Level coursework in 2008, I wrote a full Microsoft Access-backed CRM in ASP around the same site, a proper data-driven version with parent records, bookings and attendance behind it rather than text files. It was marked and handed in; it was never deployed.

That was a deliberate call. Holding children's data anywhere in 2008 was a serious responsibility and the stack I was writing on, ASP Classic, Access, hard-coded passwords, a coursework-grade understanding of security, wasn't the place to do it. I knew enough to know I didn't know enough. It was a good exercise and a bad production system, and I'm glad I didn't ship it.

The source is long gone.

Verdict at 15, and at 36

Then: I got paid £100 to write a website. I think I felt ten feet tall.

Now: It's frames, tables, Comic Sans, hard-coded passwords, and a FrontPage/WebDAV workflow that would give a modern SRE an aneurysm. It's also the first thing I ever made that someone else used. It belongs in the portfolio for exactly that reason.

Links

• Wayback Machine capture: kxlan.co.uk/ramalley
• Source: lost, the hosting box is long gone and nothing from that era survived in source control.