Maldaba Work Experience 2014

Last week was a big milestone for Maldaba, we had our first Work Experience placement!  16-year-old Ezra spent the week with us here in the office, and writes about his time with the team:

On the first day, I learnt how to create animated GIFs in Photoshop which were put on the company’s public website to make it more eye-catching. GIFs reminded me of flip books because you just add each frame at a time and they loop repeatedly.

On Tuesday I edited another image from the website to include a new logo and afterwards, began working on making the content of the Dwell website using HTML.  Dwell is a software product the company built, and they need a promotional website to advertise it.  I was given the Photoshop design and the image assets, and had the job of writing the HTML and CSS for the Dwell website. I continued working on this on Wednesday, and on Thursday I started to use CSS to change how the content appeared in a browser.

When I was shown the website CSS Zen Garden, I learnt that websites have two sides to them – the content and also the code for how it will appear the user.   I started building the website using Komposer, but when that became too slow I moved to hand-writing the HTML and CSS in Notepad++.

CSS was interesting because it is very easy to see changes instantly which is different from HTML where sometimes you will add something but it will make no difference which can be confusing. Also, with CSS, huge changes can be made with just a few lines of code. Doing this was very useful in general because I now know some of the principles of making websites (before I thought you had to buy loads of programs e.g. Dreamweaver but now I know you can just use Notepad++). Notepad ++ was free to download and clearly colour-codes every piece of code you type.

Although I encountered many problems and found many aspects of writing in HTML and CSS (something I had never done before) to be challenging, I believe that doing work experience here taught me some key problem-solving skills. For example it helped me know which terms to search in Google and I was advised which websites I should use to learn particular skills, for example HTML Dog.

Thanks Ezra.  We’re glad you enjoyed your week here, it was a pleasure having you in the office!