As the Digital Content Creation Intern for the blog Polished for Pennies, I get to work on both the creative and technical sides of website development. I had never taken a class on, or even played around with website creation before this internship. So when Vittoria gave me the challenge of implementing our creative plan onto her WordPress site through coding and plug-ins, I was extremely nervous, yet excited to make our vision into a reality.
During my first few weeks at Polished for Pennies, I studied Vittoria's brand closely and listened to the goals she had for her new website. I articulated Vittoria's vision for Polished for Pennies into a cohesive, creative website layout using Photoshop and InDesign. We met each week to tweak, improve, and push the boundaries on these designs and finally reached a place where we felt we could start implementing these designs onto the website.
Extremely intimidated by its complexity and unfamiliarity, I tiptoed into the WordPress world. I was afraid to change anything, as I thought it would ruin it forever. However, knowing that the site wasn't live yet finally got me to start playing around with fonts, layout, styling, and content. I scoured YouTube and Google for tutorials and tips, and quickly began making progress. After weeks of work, the site was finally starting to slightly resemble our vision for it. I was so proud of accomplishing something that I never dreamed I could do, yet was still frustrated that things weren't exactly how I saw them in my head. I didn't know how to finesse the finer details as a professional would.
Vittoria could sense my frustration with the technical side of my job. She began assigning me more creative projects as I was working on the site to keep the left side of my brain active. I got to create a cover photo for the Polished for Pennies Facebook page. I loved experimenting with this project and got great feedback from Vittoria. Better yet, Vittoria recently informed me that we will be getting professional help with the website! Not only will we get to learn from the best, but I'll also get to focus more on the design of the website, without having to worry about how to make it possible. Without the limitations of my knowledge of technology, we can push Polished for Pennies to be a dynamic and engaging blog that lives up to and enhances the inspiring content that Vittoria displays on it.
I'm so excited to be sharing this journey with D&M@Work, so make sure you follow along with me at Polished for Pennies! And look out for the new cover photo that I designed on the P4P Facebook!
I can definitely relate to your frustration with website creation. My internship over the summer had me doing the same thing and it took the whole summer for everything to be perfected. It definitely helps to just stop for a little bit and do something else. Good luck with it!
ReplyDeleteI definitely applaud you for revamping a website. I remember in Nick's Computer Design class when we had to do that and it was completely frustrating, and that wasn't even the actual technical side of the website! It's cool that you get to use Photoshop and InDesign though. I think that a lot of people don't realize that the things we learn in our classes are actually helpful. Good luck with the website! It sounds like you're learning a lot and being successful with it! You are definitely learning skills that will help you in the future!
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