The First Two Months at Work
I've been working for over two months now. The work really is interesting — they're constantly handing me tasks I'm running into for the first time and have absolutely no idea how to do. At first it's just a rush, when after a few hours you finish doing something you previously had no clue how to do, and you've either figured out the solution yourself or found it online. What's interesting is that with a shallow search for some solutions you turn up results saying it's very hard or impossible to do, but if you dig deeper or think it over properly, a not-too-difficult solution turns up.
Mostly I do the tasks my boss finds on freelance sites — the kind of thing you could do from home, but the firm has a good reputation, so finding clients is no problem. I doubt I'd be able to deal with the client myself successfully, working out all the details. And there's no way I could make myself work at home either :) You could say this kind of work isn't prestigious and doesn't have great prospects. But considering that the city's large programming firms have made layoffs because of the crisis and are having trouble with orders, a small firm like this with lots of clients is the best option when you have zero experience under the current conditions.
Below is a short list of the sites and what I did for them in these first months — whether that's a lot or a little I don't know, with experience it'll become clear. In the future, I think, this list will come in handy, and here it won't get lost.
pechi.kamin.su – porting another store's design into a WebAsyst Shop-Script template, setting up the online store, modifying the engine's templates.
arto.su – studying, understanding, and various reworks and changes to the scripts of a ready-made custom-built site engine.
prokuratura.org.ua – migrating and converting the site's database into a WordPress database.
allmobile.com.ua – installing and configuring vBulletin and vBadvanced, porting the markup onto vBadvanced module templates and vBulletin forum templates, installing additional modules for the forum, changing the standard templates of the forum and portal themes.
pallada-doc.com – SEO for the site engine, changes to the scripts and templates of a custom-built engine.
agrosila.com.ua – porting a forum's laid-out design onto a vBulletin theme template.
oriflame-ok.com – porting a laid-out design onto Joomla!, installing the necessary components, modules, and plugins, modifying and configuring them to the client's needs. Communicating with clients, editing and writing the site's user manual.
energobusiness.com.ua – migrating and converting an 800+ MB database into a WordPress database.
lampa77.ru – creating a new WebAsyst Shop-Script theme from a laid-out design, changes to the script's templates, changes and fixes to the online store engine's scripts (splitting news into news and articles, adding images to the news, modifying the simple search, fixing print forms).
poliv.kherson.ua – porting a static site onto Joomla! Installing and modifying components, modules, and plugins. Creating 301 and 303 redirects for requests to the old addresses.
expertnalog.ru – porting a laid-out design onto Joomla!. Installing, configuring, and modifying components, modules, and plugins in line with the mockup. Translating the interface and menu elements into English.
clutches.ru – porting a laid-out design onto the firm's custom-built engine, changes to the engine's scripts for a specific online store.
P.S. And detailed work reports really are a good thing — afterward it's convenient even for yourself to look back and assess how you spent your working time and what you did; without them I wouldn't have remembered everything I'd been working on.