Close to the end of my first year, I had children enrolled on my course but nowhere near enough to make it profitable. It was make or break time so I decided to invest in a website and www.cottagecooks.co.uk was made, thanks to a wonderful man called Pete Weeks at Daneswood Solutions. He must have dreaded my phone calls and e mails asking really quite dozy questions but answered them all with good humour!!

The children’s cooking courses were good but I didn’t feel they were enough to base an entire website around so I racked my brains for what else would grasp kids imaginations (and their parents too!) and want to get them cooking. So cookie cutters, cake cases, pretty & practical aprons were added to our online store, along with a new range of individual cooking kits and cooking parties.

I was thrilled with my new website but the traffic didn’t exactly pour in so over the months, it got tweaked and adjusted. As a small business, I didn’t want to invest everything in the site but with hindsight, that’s what I should have done.

Another year of pottering along then a problem came up with the license on the e store. So Pete got back to work and rejigged the site into a much more workable format to give me www.cottagecooks.co.uk in the format it is today. The time helped me to learn various aspects of running a website and as I became more proficient, the business expanded.

I finally started to believe that I could really make a go of it……..it’s very easy to lose faith when you run a business on your own, inspite of backup and support from friends and family. That took us to September 2006.