An Unexpected Opportunity
As my job with Victoria’s Secret was finishing up, I had a new position all lined up to start in the new year. In between Christmas and New Year’s, the recruiter called and asked me what my rate was.
I thought that was an odd question since we all agreed on the rate and I filled out the necessary paperwork to start. It turns out that the client had a budget meeting and needed to reevaluate their expenses. Long story short, the whole thing fell through at the last moment.
It’s Good to Have a Backup Plan
At about the same time things seemed to be solidifying with the aforementioned client, another recruiter had contacted me about a temp position with Bed Bath & Beyond.
When the previous job fell through I went to interview for this position, even though it was slated to only last 2-3 months.
When the interviewer asked when could I start, my answer was, “I can come back after lunch”. In reality I started about two weeks later.
The reason for the position and the 2-3 month timeline was that they were transitioning their blog, which was on WordPress, to Drupal, the CMS that currently ran their main consumer site.
Transition to Drupal
The current blog was on WordPress, which I was already familiar with from my time at the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids. Biweekly site refreshes where done to the site with a few articles getting uploaded in between refreshes.
Some of the work would involve transferring content from WordPress to Drupal; the primary reason I was there was to build out the main landing pages and the associated modules that would get placed and updated on them.
The current staff was comprised of writers who were used to WordPress, which is much more user friendly than Drupal.
After the transition was complete I continued to setup and schedule the site refreshes and documented how to use the site; the developers’ documentation was geared to a more technical audience.
Everyday Responsibilities
After the transition, my work settled into some ongoing work:
- Check for bugs and report any problems with developers.
- Coordinate work on imagery.
- Review content sheet slated for upcoming site refreshes and check for existing resources.
- Maintain list of updates in Jira.
- Image retouching.
- Create/update documentation on how site refreshes are done.
- Build out modules to go on pages in Drupal
Extended Work
After the Drupal transition, and taking on the ongoing work of refreshing the site, I was asked to work on some other things:
- Creating blog pages for buy buy Baby.
- Documenting instructions for Workfront, (web-based work management and project management software system).
- Took our Google Sheets and built an app in Quickbase (an application development platform.
- Wrote Perl and Google scripts to automate tasks.