I installed a couple of cameras monitoring the front and rear of our house. The biggest problem was the spiders, they are attracted by the infra red, build their webs across the cameras and cause multiple triggers at night. The solution was to configure the lights in the cameras to be off, and mount independent infra red led flood lights a couple of feet to the side of the cameras.

There are numerous ways to build a website and personally I (now a retired techie) would suggest that WordPress is probably the way to go, it has hundreds of themes to choose from and modern themes will automatically handle mobiles tablets etc. There are numerous plugins for WordPress websites and most are free. Also, if you want to get into the nitty gritty and start custom coding you can. The big mistake though is to believe that a computer literate techie can handle DESIGN. To design a website needs a different skillset. I have mostly used someone else to produce a design, layout, fonts, colour pallet etc and then I just implement the design. Otherwise, you end up spending hours having to randomly trying different colours, fonts etc to see what looks good. As well as all this it is worth considering that, even if you have the most wonderful website in the world, it is worthless if no one is looking at it. You need to make sure that you start off on the right foot and consider the site's SEO and how you will market it right from the start. Good luck.

In 2007 I retired and moved to the small coastal town of Lyme Regis, Dorset, UK. After almost 40 years of working with computers I found it difficult to let go and so volunteered my skills. It has been a great way of becoming part of the community, but there is a warning. A lot of retired people who volunteer find that quite quickly they have to back-off. It is very easy to sell your services for nothing. I have helped the town build up its tourism's IT infrastructure, web sites, webcams, public touchscreens, event screens etc. It has now got to the point where it's almost a full time job so I want to back-off. The catch-22 is that, I'm the only one who knows how all this was put together (lots of bespoke code). It would be very difficult for another company to take it over, they almost certainly would want to replace it and the cost would be prohibitive and difficult for the town to fund. The town council insists on paying me a small retainer but this just means I am now contracted whereas I want to be retired. The idea was that, on retirement, I would spend a couple of years practising like mad on my Fender Strat so that I would be as good as Clapton, however after 40 years it's difficult not to get drawn to the computer keyboard rather than the guitar. Pathetic I know. So, if there's anyone near Lyme Regis who would like to share the load, let me know. There might even be some money in it.