The Internship Experience in Covid-19 Times

This is post number 4 of the remote Internship series during Covid-19 times. For a collection of all installments, click here.

The Inception

It is a Saturday when I am writing this. The curricular internship kicks off whenever I want around these days. Yesterday I was presented with the first projects the company would like me to work on. This is a small team of people. It is by no means a big organization. This firm has been only established very recently. My position, maybe also due to this fact, is more akin to the one of a digital marketing freelancer as opposed to a 9-5 employee. This means that I am not expected to clock in at 9 am and sign off at 5 pm. Rather, I am expected to work on the projects at my own pace and managing my own time, to then report the progress made to the leader through remote calls and reports. To begin with, I am going to work deeply on some defined tasks on website design and development. Numerous parts of the website must be honed and refined deeply to increase the quality of user experience, augment user retention and conversion rates as well. In addition, website responsiveness (the ability of the website to adapt to different screen sizes and be usable) is one of the top priorities. So, working on improving the overall look and feel of the website is one of the first projects I am embarking on.

Weeks 1 & 2

For now, I have divided the website redesign process into two main phases: wireframing (creating prototypes of the design using Figma) and implementation (actually building the front-end pages). This job is similar to the one a web designer would do, as far as I can tell. Although I am not a formally educated web designer by any means, I deeply enjoy design, copywriting, as well as using CSS to make things look as envisioned. I particularly tend to find fulfillment from the ability to identify patterns and organize information orderly on a page, which is probably a corollary of web design, or design in general.

So, throughout week 1, I developed the wireframes for some pages of the website that are pivotal and must be redesigned first, as well as implemented the design on the website platform after having the wireframes iterated and adjusted accordingly. I will now work on the homepage of the website, which needs a new, fresh look and feel. While working on this main project (website design), I have also been tasked with other miscellaneous endeavors, such as updating the e-commerce store of the website (which is ongoing) and writing a job description for an SEO consultant we would like to hire right after the redesign of the website.

These projects are what I have worked on during the second full week of the internship. The website redesign project is a big one, which is, however, reaching its endpoint. There are not many pages and elements left to recreate, although this is merely the foundation of the website, which will then be updated regularly. The second week has also been the week of uploading new products on the e-commerce backend system. This is an incredibly tedious process, especially owing to the slowness of the e-commerce platform used by the company, which took around 5/6 hours. Nonetheless, doing repetitive and low-ranking tasks seems to be an inherent part of the process of learning and being an intern. To each their own. In addition, this is something new I learned (uploading and managing products on an e-commerce platform).

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