Working in Ireland has been noticeably more laid back than working in the United States. While I like certain aspects of the freedom and trust they have given to me, I have found it hard to adapt and get used to the lack of specific guidelines. My supervisor, Tricia, works remotely most days except Wednesdays, and sometimes I have been hesitant to reach out and ask if there are specific tasks I should be focusing on. She gave me a general list of tasks that I will be doing throughout the internship, but not many instructions on how to approach each one. For example, I was assigned to create phishing campaigns and learning courses to send out to the staff for the rest of the year. While she was extremely nice and said to ask questions if I had any, she did not walk me through how to use the application, just told me to look around the site and explore. Eventually, I got the hang of the website and completed my task, but I think it would have been helpful if there were clearer instructions or if Tricia had sent me a walkthrough. In addition, even though she told me to ask questions since she was not physically in the office, I was hesitant to reach out via email. I realize this is something I have to work on, learning to not be afraid to ask for help.
For instance, Tricia had asked me to let her know once I published the courses and phishing campaigns. However, I was initially confused since the items appeared as “published” in the Fusion Template Creation section but were not actually live. I was not sure if I should stop at that stage or take further steps and push my content to live. I was also unsure if I needed to assign the campaigns to a specific target group or schedule them for a particular date. Once I reached out for clarification, Tricia explained that I should add my content to campaigns that had already been set up, and she provided the specific names of those campaigns. She also told me that I could pick any date around the middle of the month for scheduling.
Another example is my task to redesign the IMMA shop website using Shopify. I had less uncertainty with this task since there was a previous website to base my ideas on. However, Eilis, the IMMA Shop and Retail Manager, told me to “do whatever I felt was right.” I wasn’t sure if she wanted me to focus on the content, the layout, or both. I decided to do both and then present the changes for feedback. In my last post, I mentioned some changes I made, and I did a lot more this week. On the current site, the footer has two menus titled “Shop” and “Info.” However, they both display the same links, so I think it was accidentally duplicated. I removed the duplicate menu and titled the remaining one “Quick Links” to make it clearer what the menu was for. In addition, they have an email subscription form, but there is no border around the form and it looks like words are just floating on the page. Since I’m working on IMMA’s shop website, I decided to look at the footer on the main IMMA website for inspiration. I noticed their footer had a location section including a link to a map. I thought this was useful so I decided to add a similar section to the shop site. In addition, I kept the email submission form, but I changed the way it was shown. Originally it was its own separate section beneath the other menus. I created a “Contact” aligned with the other menu columns. I then added the email form and social media icons in that section. I thought keeping them together in one section looked cleaner and more cohesive.
After refining the footer, I focused on the rest of the homepage. I mentioned in my last post that I changed the homepage banner. Originally, the website featured a single collection of products on the homepage called “Irish Gifts.” While I didn’t get rid of that collection, I thought the homepage should focus on more than just one collection of products and should highlight more of what the shop offers. I decided to add four sections to give users more options: IMMA Editions, Gifts, Books, and Irish Art. I felt like this did a better job of showcasing what products were offered on the website and made the site feel more complete and engaging.
