“Be a sponge,” Someone said right at the beginning or maybe even before I started this internship to be a sponge. By that they meant, to use this to absorb as much information as I can. From how coworkers interact with each other to how they dress. I was going to be interested, observe and learn. My goal for this internship was to be a sponge.
First a bit about myself. Quincy local for 11 years (same length as how long I’ve been an avid Taylor Swift fan. I am a QU Senior majoring in Marketing and Minoring in PR and Graphic Design Active in Student Government, QU Honors Program, Art Club, Financial Literacy (interest in investing and money management), CEO Club, Sigma Beta Delta the Business School Fraternity
Through QU I’m a Junior Achievement Volunteer. If any of you have kids you may have heard of JA. Where you go into schools and teach kids from K-12 about entrepreneurship, money management and about businesses. I’ve also gone on a couple Mission trips. One last year to New Orleans and one this year (right before the GD internship in Montgomery. (See Picture)
Now what you really want to hear about, all of my experiences and projects at GD Of course, the largest project we worked on was building the website. However first I will explain the first project I worked on for the first week and a half I was here which is the taxonomies of industrials and applications in Staging GD, From there I will walk through a couple of the processes we used to input information such as uploading the panels (info, features, benefits) and then also the process for uploading brochures data and performance sheets.
I had the opportunity to attend a few meetings and well touch on what I learned from the meetings and then lastly what I took away from the awesome lunch with a leader days.
For my taxonomy organization project (prior to meeting Kara who was off in England) I was given a list of Industrials and Applications.
Here’s the list of Industrials and Applications. I would open each category.
To find another list of subcategories. I would open each subcategory and click on each product to gather information for a spreadsheet
[click subcategory list] Here’s just a look at all of the chemical information for each category. Pages and Pages of work with each heading)
Part of the reason I included the taxonomy project was because I really took away a very strong lesson on attention to detail. I’m very much a person who likes to get things done quick and efficiently. So have a recognized a pattern I would copy and paste previous taxonomy products into my spreadsheet. Every now and then I would have to backtrack because I would forget a product or put in one too many. The taxonomy project taught me to work at pace where I would be able to efficiently input information and do it right the first time so I wouldn't have to backtrack and re input information. Slowly I was able to work up to a higher speed
This prepared me for the rest of my internship to remember to pay a strong attention to detail when working. This will also benefit me in any and all jobs in the future because a lot of what makes up marketing is paying attention to your details in knowing your customer or marketing to a customer. I chose this quote because I think it sums up a lot of my intership. A quote by John Wooden, a previous UCLA coach and player who passed away about 6 years ago. He said,” It’s the little details that are vital. Little things make big things happen.” In creating the website, we focusing entirely on attention to detail when inputting content.
Now for the website: as soon as Kara came back from her business trip to England we dove right into working on the website. I chose this picture because it really exemplifies what we did in the month that we worked on the website. We truly built a website from the bottom up and here are the processes we used.
For weeks two and three I began creating the website structure for Compressors, Blowers Mobile and Aftermarket. This process was similar for the Intro, Features and benefits. 1st. I would find my next product in my best friend the New Website Structure checklist. 2nd I would open up the product content page Excel sheet that each product manager made for each product and find the information for that product and Copy the information it had listed.
Then, I would go to Staging Gardner Denver (the back end of the website), navigate through the website structure to find features and paste the information changing any of the formatting necessarily (LOTS of reformatting)
Lastly, I would always mark off which product I had worked on to keep me on track and organized
From this I learned a couple HTML tricks from Kara which were very handy in formatting information which I would have to do for just about every product. I learned how to attach a file to a hyperlink which I utilized a few slides ago when we looked at the Excel sheet. Lastly, I taught my self that right clicking on the library tab opens up my frequent and pinned library paths. VERY handy in saving my self hundred of the thousands of clicks I would do a day. Each of the slashes would be click for me to get to the product of photo I was looking for.
Now for the brochures, data sheets and performance sheets. 1st I’m going to explain the brochures and data sheets then I will describe the performance sheets. I went to the old website and downloaded the PDF files to a common folder within my actual computer library.
Then I created a folder for all of my Downloads.
I made one for both the brochures, data sheets and one for the performance sheets. Then I would upload the PDF as DMS document so I had all of my brochure and data files in one common place.
Because many brochures were located in multiple different products, a person could go in and change brochure in this common folder and be able to have the document changed in each folder online! Then I went into each of the products and used the brochures required for each product and uploaded each of them following this path.
For my Performance sheets, I would take all of my brochures from my product content page and open all of them into one Adobe Acrobat page. Then I would extract ONLY the performance data from each brochure
After extracting only the performance data I would take all of the performance and SAVE AS the information under the products name. Then populate my information the same way I uploaded brochures and data sheets
Before I tell you what I learned from this process I’m going to show you the final outcome. The last few things we did was link accordion panels, which are each of the panels I made, all to the main Intro Page. We spent about a week proofing the work and filling in wholes Then finally on Monday July 11th we launched the website. This is a look at the GD products website before the update. 8 years ago was the last most recent website. Here is what the website looks like today.
[click on the image]
I’m going to use a Shrek reference and say that websites are like onions. They have many layers to them. For example: You can’t upload the Accordion Panels that you saw until I have all Panels created with content with them As you saw in my example they also have many steps to populating information sometimes as well.
I learned a little bit about how to use Adobe Acrobat and that if I don’t know something, if I can’t figure it out myself, it’s always okay to ask. I might learn more than I thought I would have
Communication is Key: especially when working with other countries. For future companies even with other coworkers I have learned that it’s very important to communicate well so that everyone is on the same page and projects one more smoothly
Lastly I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you for listening to my reflection and giving me the opportunity to be a sponge and be interested, observe and learn from the internship with you.
