Design Intern

Lil_C

Complete n00b
May 19, 2009
20
0
0
Oklahoma City
I got notice two weeks ago about an internship opportunity at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum and I'm basically assigned a project to make all their kiosks run on a CMS. These kiosks have been running on visual basic which was created on microsoft access about seven years ago.

Anyhow, my real question is.. will this really teach me anything valuable when it comes to learning SEO? Because this is my first open sourced project with wordpress and i really want to know if getting into projects like this will give me a good kick start. Especially since I'm broke and now have two jobs... really 3. This project for intern hours at my technology center, job at a movie theatre that i just got, and learning all that i can in AM.
 


dont think seo since the kiosks arent on the internet.
however you will learn to find your way around a cms, and thats awfully handy for anything else you wanna do later, like maybe seo, or ecommerce, or ...

kinda depends on where you wanna go in the future if its worth it or not, but it sounds rewarding and who knows.. maybe they will need support on it later on.
 
If you're gonna be using wordpress, you'll probably spend most of your time there trying to get php and mysql to run.
 
I got notice two weeks ago about an internship opportunity at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum and I'm basically assigned a project to make all their kiosks run on a CMS. These kiosks have been running on visual basic which was created on microsoft access about seven years ago.

Anyhow, my real question is.. will this really teach me anything valuable when it comes to learning SEO? Because this is my first open sourced project with wordpress and i really want to know if getting into projects like this will give me a good kick start. Especially since I'm broke and now have two jobs... really 3. This project for intern hours at my technology center, job at a movie theatre that i just got, and learning all that i can in AM.

If back40 design as anything to do with it you will learn something. You'll learn how a slimy piece of shit will fuck you.
 
SEO? SEO is something you can learn in a weekend on SEO Book and examining top result SERPS for interesting keywords and understanding why they rank for that term so well. It's low hanging fruit on the internet knowledge tree.

If you fulfill the demands for this internship, you're learning something much more productive and practical than understanding SEO. You can also glorify it in your resume because it's a pretty cool task. In other words, information systems design is a more marketable and practical skill than "SEO expertise".

Since you seem focused on learning SEO and then you mention that you ultimately want to learn AM, I'm guessing that you really are talking about learning Search Engine Marketing (SEM), which is the bread and butter of AM. To briefly compare the two, SEO is optimizing a website so search engines consider it relevant to its contents and to those searching for its contents. It's passive and mostly a waiting game with delayed gratification. SEM is actively marketing a product. Two different animals.

But maybe I just misunderstood. Anyways, your internship sounds like a good gig. The only jobs that explicitly prepare you for AM would be an internet marketing boutique like Adlucent (Austin, Texas bias ;)) that get you pushing client PPC accounts and other highly relevant experience.

I recommend Googling "<Your City> Internet Marketing" and seeing what companies pop up. If you can't find a job page or any applicable openings, just send them an email with your resume and an honest cover letter detailing your interest in getting your foot in the industry. Ask them if they have any internship or entry level positions available because you're dedicated to learning the skills.

Anyways, I'm gonna assume you're a young buck since you're working at a movie theater and doing internships. You should be spending less time worrying if your internship will give you highly niche experience and more time trying to upgrade your ticket counting Cinemark position.