This past fall our Brand Manager, Jeff Bishop and our Web Design Team Lead, John Quan had the opportunity to work with SPARK (sparkprogram.org), an apprenticeship program for at- risk youth in various cities nationwide. The two were paired up with an 8th grade student named Brian from Santa Monica, California.
During Brian's apprenticeship, they assisted him with creating a website using WordPress for his father’s business. The purpose behind using WordPress was to allow Brian and his family to easily keep the site up to date. In order to accomplish this, Brian was taught how to create and edit posts and pages. A gallery plugin was also installed, which organized the beautiful photography that Brian took of his father’s work. These are currently being displayed on the site at otiliolandscaping.com.
Brian was also exposed to tools that our web design team uses daily such as Adobe Photoshop and Fireworks. These programs were used to crop and resize photos, as well as design a simple mockup of a website. For his father’s site, Brian used Photoshop to create the leaderboard image.
While John helped Brian to learn more about making awesome websites, Brian was not the only one learning. John was able to learn about Brian’s passion for video games, what he was working on in school and what middle school kids like to do for fun (a lot has changed since we were in middle school!)
At the end of the program, Brian was able to showcase his work to his peers, teachers and community members at a graduation ceremony at his school. Brian was given a certificate of achievement from SPARK for his accomplishment. To top it all off, graduation day was also Brian’s father’s birthday. Brian was able to give the website to his dad as his birthday gift.
We had a blast working with SPARK and hope to continue in the future. If you would like to learn more about SPARK and how you can help or get involved in your local city, please visit sparkprogram.org.
IMH is very proud and appreciative of Jeff and John for their participation and awesome leadership.
Brian receiving a tour of our LA data center. Brian with his SPARK Mentors.
