Experiencing my first office job

We were recently contacted by a training company who asked us if we would be interested in taking on an apprentice. We think it's a great concept; giving a young person the opportunity to enter the workforce and train on the job while working towards an NVQ qualification. Our new apprentice is Shannon Timms-Mitchell (Junior Marketing & Admin Assistant). Here, Shannon writes about her first week at SimpleClick.

On Monday, October 10^th, I started my first full-time office job at SimpleClick. At first it seemed a little daunting, but within a few days I felt settled. My confidence is slowly growing from the little I had and I think in time I will ‘come out of my shell’.

People who have never worked in an office before tend to have a stereotypical view of a working environment; however the office atmosphere is more welcoming, open and outgoing at SimpleClick.

Being an outsider to the website design business, one thing I find remarkable is being able to see what goes on behind the scenes. I don’t think many people realise all of the work that has to be done to create the finished website, therefore most people often take this for granted. When creating, building and developing, often a cycle is used starting at analysis, plan, design, implement and test - this type of cycle can be used for almost anything, including websites.

I feel another interesting area within the business is the search engine market and Google analytics. I knew these sorts of things had to be in place for websites to exist, but like most of the general public, I never really thought about it in too much detail, as it hasn’t really concerned me.

Google analytics is used on 49.95%, almost half, of the top 1 million websites. It amazes me how every click you make while on the internet could be recorded and placed into a database.

SimpleClick use Google analytics in websites they design and create, it is a smart way to be able to see many different things about how visitors use the websites such as which is the most popular page to the amount of time visitors spent on the website. As the owner of a website I would imagine this sort of data / information would be very useful for many reasons.

Another thing I find interesting about the company is the way in which they make the websites easy to use. As a user of the internet, we all know what it is like when something doesn’t go the way we want to, and in the end give up. SimpleClick make the websites they create user friendly to try stop this happening, as it could mean a sale lost or a visitor which never returns.