Creating the new fionadrive

When Fiona first asked me to look at rebuilding fionadrive, I thought I had a fairly good idea of what the job would involve.

I was wrong.

I knew Fiona had been writing about driver training, coaching and instructor development for many years, but it wasn’t until I started going through the old website properly that I realised just how much material was there.

We eventually identified 55 published posts stretching back over more than a decade.

It would have been very easy to simply copy everything across to a new website and call the job finished. I didn’t want to do that.

I have used AI to help me organise and process some of the material, but I have also personally read a great deal of it. I wanted to understand what was being moved, what was still relevant, what was historical, and importantly, what was actually Fiona’s voice.

Some articles show how Fiona’s thinking developed over the years. Others record training, qualifications, learner experiences and ideas that later became part of the way she works today.

There were also things that shouldn’t simply be presented as new. Terminology changes. Qualifications and courses change. Driving tests change. Websites certainly change.

So rather than wiping away the history, the aim has been to preserve it while making it clear where something belongs to an earlier point in Fiona’s professional journey.

That has probably made rebuilding fionadrive a bigger job than either of us originally expected, but I think it has also made it a much better one.

The new site isn’t intended simply to look newer than the old one. It should make Fiona’s training, resources and ideas easier to find, while retaining the years of experience sitting behind them.

I’ve also built tools into the new site so Fiona can create and manage future Insights herself. That means this archive shouldn’t just stop with the move from the old website.

It can continue.

And after spending this much time reading Fiona’s work, I suspect there will be plenty more to come.