Hi! I am a student trying to make a website for my school. I imagine it to be a platform similar to twitter/reddit where students can communicate with teachers and staff to make suggestions, ask questions, and feel closer to the school. This is my first experience with website development, so I am seeking the advice of all of you experienced developers to give me some direction of where to go from here.

Last school year, I discussed with the vice principal and a student council about the idea and it was well received, but I think they were expecting a prototype in like 2 months. It's been 5 months, and I've got nothing to show. The following is what I've done in that time in chronological order: learned HTML+CSS+JS, "learned" Django (Bad teacher and bad student. I got close to nothing from that), tried building a website and realized it'll take forever, discovered the world of technologies, followed this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCm5RVYKWVg tutorial and built a minimal reddit clone (The site is so slow), attempted to customize it to the school's needs, failed, decided to restart it on my own using tailwind, app router, and copying backend logic from the reddit clone, found that I don't know nearly enough to make a production grade site, and finally fell to discord seeking help.

What should I do now? Should I try to customize the reddit clone, continue my own website, follow a more modern tutorial like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSUKMfmLAt0, or something else? Time matters. I'll be graduating in a year and it would be best if I could release a beta version in ~3 months. It would also be great to have a mentor who could teach me the best practices and keep me on a track to success.

Please forgive me if you see me in this forum a lot. I'll really need it.