Tom Hollevoet
Calibrate, that's thinking, doing and going through your digital roof. This applies not only to our customers, but also to our employees. And to ensure this future, every year we give a few trainees the opportunity to gain experience and develop themselves.
This year our team will be temporarily reinforced with three trainees. One of them is Britt Verschueren (20). She studies Graphic and Digital Media at the Artesis Plantijn Hogeschool in Antwerp. Sarah Jehin (20) and Thomas Van Roy (23) complete the trio. Both study Multimedia Technology at the Karel de Grote Hogeschool in Hoboken. "We're not a number, we're really part of the team.
During their internship they mainly work on projects with Magento, an open source e-commerce platform based on PHP and one of the most popular web shop systems of the moment. Magento offers a complete package with lots of possibilities and functionalities. The 2.0 version, which was released in 2015, guarantees an enormous number of useful tools. The back-end is much better elaborated compared to the first version (with a much more intuitive and user-friendly feel), and in addition to that better navigation also focuses more on increasing total revenues. As far as the front-end is concerned, the program also shows itself to be a real winner, thanks to the responsive web design and a faster performance theme. The biggest improvement, however, lies in the checkout procedure, which now takes place in just two simple steps (instead of six steps in the original version). For any developer working with webshops, Magento is therefore a versatile and reliable option worth considering.
“As Magento itself points out, the learning curve is quite high. That's why it sometimes takes a while to get away with something completely,” says Sarah. “That's because of the many functionalities it contains. But by working with it so much, you learn a lot from it, of course. In addition, the community also offers good support, so that you always find a solution quickly. Now I've already mastered it.”
This large community is indeed one of the biggest advantages of Magento. For every possible question there is an answer online. Magento also allows you to link multiple webshops on different domain names to a single system. Finally, it is also search engine friendly. Magento offers many options for SEO that only cheer marketers up. “Magento is an impressive framework with which you can really achieve a lot,” says Thomas.
While Sarah and Thomas focus on the back-end, Britt is mainly concerned with the front-end. “In Magento you have content blocks that you can write yourself with html code. You can also style them yourself,” says Britt. “In this way you can add your own code to an existing theme. These blocks can also be reused on different pages. It's also very easy to call up these blocks on pages, so that you can quickly construct a page.”
During their internship Britt, Sarah and Thomas get a taste of the real thing. “This internship allows me to better assess what life is like in the workplace, and how it will actually be like in the future,” says Thomas. “We really are part of the team. It's interesting to experience the whole process of a project. There's so much more to it than just working it out,” adds Britt. “You also learn faster because you can always ask experienced colleagues for information. They are always there for us if we have a problem. We're not a number here,” concludes Sarah.
Are you still studying and did you feel like joining our team as a trainee after reading these testimonials? Then don't hesitate to contact us! Calibrate is always looking for motivated students for internships as a developer, but also for marketing positions, copywriters and graphic design.
