The challenges that I faced as an intern were many. This was because I felt like I was being thrown into the middle of a ring of fire around me. Knowing that any wrong turn or move that I made would cost me every learning opportunity and I was scared of having to try again with a different job, or company. Getting to know the team and those around me was easy, taking on a full website to manage by myself was difficult for someone that was still learning every step of being a web designer. To tell you my experience as an Intern, The position they had me in was difficult because it was for web developers more than just web designers. So I took this position as best as I could while trying to get to know the pros and cons of working with WordPress and with the company. But, The company called Foundation for Family Life in Utah did As i was studying at Utah Valley University. During my time as a first time intern I was immediately in charge of learning what Wordpress is and how to use it so that I can manage their company website. I was grateful to have a tutor there who gave me tons of directions and was willing to help me out in all my misunderstandings.
About the company
Foundation for Family life is a company as well as an organization that hired me as a first time intern. They go through a lot of interns each semester so I should clarify that it was my first internship. The Foundation is Utah based and is family centered as the company strives to help men and women with rehab as they turn their lives and habits around from either being an alcoholic, a drug abuser, and or both that lead to being behind bars and locked away somewhere. For each of their clients it is hard to break out of a long strong habit and the Foundation hires on life coaches to help with their therapeutic needs. Helping others in this way has proven them as a company to grow in terrifically measurable ways even as the CEO and founder had also gone through this himself for the benefit of his family. Each person through their provided program can testify about how they were able to change their lives around from being a drug addict, to being a person with strong devotions to his or her family, and their commitments to staying sober. Each person takes on committed tasks of their own accord with a willing heart and mind to not just stay sober, but to busy their lives with work and taking proper care of their health and meeting their personal care needs both mentally and physically, as well as spiritually.
The life coaches they provide for their clients are hired and trained as professionals to guide others in their efforts by their daily or weekly commitments to help improve the clients needs and other personal matters. This is much better than sitting in an office with a counselor, who listens to your problems and then points out all your wrong doings and mistakes that you have. Counseling in this matter is not like life coaching. Instead the life coaches guide you by asking you questions that make you think about how to reach for a solution and find a commitment towards that solution. They do that while looking for unity and common ground by sharing sympathy and shows empathy with their clients. It is important to find ways to help rather than being a counselor that expects the change over fault shaming and blaming before looking into the proper and solution they can think or give to you. Life coaches guide their clients to find proper and helpful solutions for themselves and follow up upon the successes that the clients have.
Learning WordPress
Like any other website I was able to adapt to it quickly knowing how to work with WordPress as I did my research and study on it. It took me a few weeks to get things down with my understanding of it all. But in short WordPress is an online software that helps build websites for personal and business reasons. WordPress is also great for developers that know a lot about coding, PHP, JavaScript, and basic designing. WordPress comes with a variety of things to help form your business needs to gain customers. However, if you do not know how to code, You are in luck because it has a variety of ways to build your site with as little to no coding as possible. WordPress is a hosting platform like some others that are out there that has easy to moderate usage depending on the level you want toward creating your site. Customizing it for your business needs. It is great for blogging and ecommerce. WordPress also has packages that can help set your site up according to its templates and themes of which there are thousands you can choose from.
WordPress also has an additional program that comes automatically with it called Elementor. This is a connection inside WordPress that helps build your site with plug-ins that are friendly and ready to go. All you have to do is add your own content to it and then see how you can change the style or placement of your website to the specific design or look that you wish to have.
The challenge of it all
Learning to work by myself was not easy when you jump right into being a web developer position. However, I am grateful to have had a boss at the time that was understanding and willing to work with me to see what all i can do to make the site how he wants it to be for his company and his customers. The expectancy was very high and demanding with my position. Therefore, The manager hired me on part time after the internship was over even with my lack of knowledge at the time of being a simple web designer. Analyzing the site, however, I started to notice some problems that have occurred with the site and striving to know how best to change it. Therefore, I started with the outreach of our customers by looking at the user experience of the site. What started to help with this was to know the analytics of the site. Seeing the connections behind the scenes and how others view the site. I learned about something called click rates which at first was low but helped the company understand that there are not a lot of visitors that come to the site for help. The Company site after all was made for that very purpose, to gain help for those who seek it and to help others in changing their lives for the better.
These pictures are a sample of what I did in helping to make changes to the fflut.org site. After making a few pages and some small changes that were assigned to me by the boss of the company I started to look at how to gain clients. I did so by adding podcasts about the company in hopes to gain more followers. The struggle was not from dealing with others in the groups of clients or working with co-workers. It was not by having a strict or mean boss at all. In fact the people I worked with or under were kind and nice. I was just mentally struggling to keep up with the things WordPress does and has. I was also tasked with taking care of three entire websites inside WordPress and having to remember where things are and what parts to change or edit over multiple domains and pages of the site. The fun part was in adding additional posts and articles each week. Being able to learn about the plug-ins and how they work was a lot more complicated than what I truly wanted.
Then in striving to make changes I accidentally clicked on a theme that almost destroyed the site. This caused a lot of trouble for me and I panicked. With my boss’s help I was able to gain everything back up from its recorded backups he kept every week. or Where recorded on his device for backup every time there were major important changes he wanted to keep. I have quickly learned that if you want to use WordPress as a hosting site. Learn quickly of the themes and templates you wish to use. Some backgrounds on themes are not easy to change, while templates can be changed according to the content you have or wish to use along with the additional plug-ins.
The last thing I learned about WordPress was how expensive things can get when building things, not just by the templates and themes to build your site for your business. But not all plug-ins for WordPress are free to download and use. However, when you have already created a site or two and connected each one from scratch. Trying to choose a theme after everything is already set can really be hard on the creativity you want your site to look like.
Conclusion
As a web designer, WordPress themes are not the friendliest to use your creative skills on because its already designed for those things. The other thing that is next but can bend to your content is the WordPress templates to how you wish your site to look and be designed. The plug-ins are easy to use as a designer because you can place them how and where ever you need them to be with the content of the pages you create. It was sad to say that I did not stay long with other intentions that I had. But I learned a lot about the importance about work ethics and being there to help others including with following up with all the demands a web developer takes on a job. However I was striving to help by finding all the bugs and problems the site had before my time with them was up. Even if i was not knowledgeable enough at the time to help fix everything about the site. For more information about this Organization please visit fflut.org .
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