Exasperated, I Built a comprehensive Florida COVID-19 updates website

On March 17th Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida started issuing Executive Orders related to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) that began to change the way Floridians did business. Every few days, a new order was being issued, but I couldn’t find a Florida COVID-19 updates website that compiled what it meant for your average citizen. I could find a few links to the actual Executive Orders, but those are dense legal documents, and each one seemed to reference others in explaining how this one affected us.

Finally, I was tired of waiting for someone to explain it to me. I’m smart enough to read legal documents and I know how to build a website. If I was going to put forth the effort to understand how all the orders fit together, I might as well share it with others.

Did you know purchasing a web domain with “COVID” or “coronavirus” is supervised so thoroughly? After settling on the domain flcovidupdates.com, it took me about an hour on support with NameCheap ← affiliate link to finalize the purchase. I had to affirm I understood that law enforcement is reviewing every website with these terms for legitimacy and that I could be arrested if I tried to scam people with my website, then I actually had to “load” the price of the domain into my account with a credit card and they manually purchased it for me through the backend.

A lot of reading and organizing later, I put together Florida Covid-19 updates website with summaries of all the executive orders and regulations by topic. Instead of wading through all the orders, trying to figure out which ones applied to restaurants and how, now people can just click to the “Restaurant” topic and see summaries of all the orders together.

The most satisfying part of building the site was how many people have told me they go to flcovidupdates.com over and over again.