Review: My first weeks internship at Studios92 (Internship-UK)
How I experience my first weeks of internship with Internship-UK, studios 92, gift-tours in New Romney?
After my 5th day here it already felt as if I am here for months! Now, is that a good or a bad thing? Oh yes, why do I list 3 company names? Pick whichever you like it is all the same company. They all offer the same internship programmes.
Ok, so I am ready to do some OOP with PHP and ASP..and unit testing and applying SEO and working in teams ..have meetings..learn from others, share my experiences and put that into practise…and lots ..lots..lots of coffee.
But..the internship programme they have is not worth money paying for!
They’ll use you and you can not go anywhere if you paid them. They don’t refund!
The work - activities
Let me start by saying: I LOVE UBUNTU and I hate mouses without ‘back’ and ‘forward’ buttons.
So how are my first weeks? I am lucky to have Jeroen by my side every day. Thanks to him I started do something that is called coding with ASP since my very first working day. My love for PHP has grown stronger ever since I wrote my very first ASP statement for one of their websites: aankom.com
So far I only worked with Jeroen on a website and only used ASP. Too busy to get the functionality working and no time to apply SEO the way they would like it to be.
At the moment of writing they have static websites mostly (apart from a few sites that have bits of ASP code). I wonder why static and I suggested that dynamic websites can improve their company. I felt they were not happy with this suggestion because static websites get indexed by Google and dynamic ones not and if the database connection (this one is sensible though) is broken, then you can not use the dynamic website. Also the URL is not user friendly with dynamic websites. (do they live under a rock??)
SEO workshop
Boring SEO workshop lasting 3 hours. No interaction and it is hard to hear what is been said. Not everything they say about SEO is true btw.
Also I suggested url rewrite to solve the URL unfriendly-ness but no luck on that one. According to them URL rewrite returns 301 or 302 and Google will ban or penalize website for using that. Showing an article written by Google where Google even suggests to use mod_rewrite did not help either. I am so lost..or I am the worst web developer ever.. :p
We all got SEO workshops. About how to optimize sites for search engines. I was pretty sure that I knew a lot about SEO and websites. Funny thing is, that most of the things they taught me are things that I never knew before (sarcasm) and never heard of before…let me give you an example with Meta keywords: Yahoo does index them and Google doesn’t at all, Google ignores them. The meta keywords are there for Yahoo only … An other example: Sponging* is not SEO friendly -_- ..shame on everyone who is embedding vids and linking to Flickr images directly ..shame shame :-s (come one, Google will punish us for that?!)
Everything they teach me is true because they are right (that is their policy) .. so I will have to take it as it is. Even if they are wrong, they are right!
Quanta Plus
Not working with Dreamweaver or Zend Studio is hard for me. Once you are used to good software and the speed to develop websites it is hard to get used to other software (I am not saying that I am fast, I just happen to develop a less slow with these software compared to Quanta).
I do enjoy working with Quanta, mainly because it is on Ubuntu and I soooo love it.
Anyway, so far my work experience for the first weeks. I really need to take a few days off.
The people here
There is not much to say about all the other studios92 interns here, besides: They are wonderful..LOVELY! There are cute girls and very nice guys. They come from everywhere! Dutch and Italians are overruling here. Dutch and Italian invasion ftw! .. Also a few from USA, Spain, France, Belgium, Germany, Lithuania etc etc.. all with studios92 of internship-uk. The question now is, are they happy? I mean the interns are great. Most of them have no work experience and learn faulty things here. Those who have experience hate this place to work but won’t say a thing to avoid official warnings. The boss and so called business manager are lousy and truly don’t have the good management style, no charisma or leadership at all.
I had a very inspirational thought for my business weeks before I started my internship with studios92. Right now I am still very confident about it and this internship encourages me to want it even more. I can not wait to look back to my successful career in web development as an intern. To return to Holland and start my own company… and to visit London very often 
Cu later..
More readings:
- Review: My experience with internship at Studios92 (Internship-UK)
- Review: Looking back to Studios92 and internship-UK.com
- Review: Studios92 & Internship-UK Webdevelopment internship | thumbs down
* their definition is: direct linking to images that is located on an other domain. From this I understand that I am not allowed to put photo’s from my own Flickr account into my own website. That is not SEO friendly. I honestly have never heard of this before. It is even hard for me to find information about it on the internet.
Hi my dear ex-colleague,
My first opinion about what you wrote about SEO is pretty much: bollocks! Google not valueing (they do use it for showing the description below the link in search results!) meta tags is correct, but 301, 302, sponging, is complete shit! I swear…
I do get the feeling a bit that everything they tell you about this and that is ‘the word’ and you don’t have much space in sharing your thoughts with them, not very nice i think.
I hope you’ll learn a lot of ubuntu so you can share your experiences with me once you make your come back (i’m counting the days ;-)).
Hang in there, and oh yeah, please, can you contact me over email about some NHL/LC issues? Not sure if i’ve got a good mailadress of you…
Kindest regards,
Jaap.
http://www.jaapvdveen.nl
Wow, where did they learn their SEO tacktics? “URL rewrite returns 301 or 302 headers” is just plain wrong. You *can* do that but normal url rewriting is just to get pretty urls and you don’t redirect *at all*.
A well-written dynamic website is, from google’s point of view, indistinguishable from a static website. That all happens on the server and google has no clue about it. So if they write static sites for seo optimization, they are throwing away a lot of money (maintaining a static site is so much more labour intensive than a dynamic site..).
“Not working with Dreamweaver or Zend Studio is hard for me. ”
dreamweaver..good?!?!?!
TEXTMATE!!!! 
@Jaap Thank you for confirming. Most things I learned there was considered outdated or just untrue.
@Ivo I have no idea, honestly. I am glad that I wasn’t telling them the wrong things. Thank you.
@Erik :p I think I will go for Notepad++ (is free and so lightweight)