Nettl Cadet: Introduction Day
I’m Lily, a graphic designer, graduated from college last summer and I have been working in the Nettl of Gloucester and Nettl of Cheltenham studios for about 6 months now. I heard about the Nettl Academy program and have been enrolled on it and look forward to learning more!
My first day as a Nettl Cadet started in the coffee shop of the Nettl business store in Birmingham. Once everyone had arrived we moved into ‘The Great Room‘, which would be our classroom for the course. We introduced ourselves as well as what the last film we watched at the cinema! (Mine was “Bridget Jones’ Baby”. But don’t judge me.) We spent the first part of the day going through what the course was about and a breakdown of the next few months.
Our first task as a Nettl Cadet was a mini branding project for a new juice bar called: “Joocy Loocy.” We were put in teams of three and given three hours to create a couple of logo concepts, leaflets, landing page mock up, copy press text and some promotional deals that the company could use as promotional offers. It was a good insight into a sample brief we might receive from a client when working in a studio. Then we took it in turns to present what we’d come up with to our ‘Professors'(!) Simon and Chris.
I really enjoyed the first day at the Nettl academy as I felt it was a really good way to get settled in and to know everyone else on the course.
Nettl Cadet Day 1: Brambl for websites
Day 2 as a Nettl Cadet, was all about a website builder Nettl created and use called Brambl. I’ve used Brambl briefly, previously but after going to this course I feel like I’ve really got a much better understanding of how brambl works and how it can be used to its full potential when creating websites.
We started by looking at an existing website and started to recreate it step by step. I found this a really good way of learning about all of the different modules that you can use and how to use them. Once we had done that, using the knowledge we had just taken from that site we used it to create a single page scroller (what our studio calls a “Nettl :one website”) for “Joocy Loocy.” It had to have some specific assets. which were: a full page (‘hero’) image, a call to action, map, and a contact panel. Returning to Gloucester on the train home, I felt confident I could put together simple websites like this for clients – it made this website-making-malarky seem a lot simpler than i thought it would be at college!
Nettl Cadet Day 2: WordPress websites
Today, we learnt some of the basics of WordPress. WordPress is a platform for building websites that Nettl like to use. It’s the most popular platform for websites, and is scalable and adaptable, so it’s felt that’s ‘best practice’ for most Nettl client’s websites. We learnt how to set up a site through Nettl’s internal system called flyerlink. This system started life controlling printing.com’s print into the production hub from around the country, but it’s also the nerve centre and mother-ship for all things web.
We learnt what a child theme was and why it’s important to use one, and how to install it. We recreated another website using a framework builder. We were taught how to build up the elements to create the site. We were also shown into the back end and were given a breakdown of what a number of the sections are and what we would use it for. Simon also showed us some useful websites and resources, that I can see being really useful going forwards. The was really informative on the different modules, what they do, shortcuts and ‘how to’ articles.
We spent the whole day going through this and recreating as much of a website as we could. Like with Brambl, I found this a really good way of getting to know what the structure of a website is like and how you would go about creating one. We have been given the logins for the week to take away, so we can have a click about and a play with WordPress and get to grips with it more.
