A WEEK AT WORK!

Author: Eden Wakefield-James (work experience/ office lackey for the week)

A week at work. Oh, I never knew how tiring it was going to be. BUT, I love it!

I am a 15-year-old student doing work experience here at Univers Labs, and I wanted to give you an insight from a teenager’s point of view of my time here.

I originally wanted to come to Univers Labs because I thought it was a cool place where my mum worked and where I could indulge my love of photography, my keen interest in design and processing strategies.

I was tasked with finding faults in the websites that I would then report to testing. Finding issues or formatting errors that would negatively impact the site and the users made me feel like I had a real, positive impact on the company. For example, the ‘text overlaps’- this results in being unable to see certain parts clearly which might make users miss an important piece of information, ‘the site is not responsive’- ‘the pictures are too pixelated’, WHAT A NIGHTMARE!

I wanted to include as much photography into my work experience as possible, and Univers Labs were more than accommodating. Max, the Head of Production, is also a photography enthusiast, and very kindly took time out of his busy schedule to give me a practical lesson. We went round various buildings in Oxford, and he showed me some techniques he uses to take amazing architectural photographs!

So why is the use of photography so crucial to websites?

Let’s use ‘Jim’ as an example:

‘Jim is a customer and was looking at lawnmowers. However, the pictures on the site were either not loading or too pixelated resulting in him being unable to see what he was buying. Because of this, Jim did not proceed with any payment. Most customers visiting the site encountered similar problems, losing the company money, customer reliability and overall credibility’ — All they had to do was change the pictures! It’s that simple.

Of course, you need a topnotch website to back up the pictures (something Univers Labs seem pretty good at!). But even with a great website, the lack of good images, especially on sites used to purchase goods from, can severely impact sales.

Photography relays information to the user very efficiently, generates more significant interest in the company, and improves overall business. Images are an easy way for customers to understand what products you are selling. It is a reliable marketing strategy which gains the company more sales through strategically placed visualisations.

Many companies don’t have a gallery or anything to portray the products or services they sell. Especially for a website that is planning to sell stuff, it would be a bit silly if you didn’t have any! So, if you want your site to be better than anyone else’s, I would suggest adding some photographs, and some pretty stellar ones at that!

I’d like to finish by saying a big THANK YOU to everyone at Univers Labs for an amazing week. It was a great introduction to the scary word of work and I’m going to miss you all!