When it comes to the web, how you look matters. The easiest way to separate a spammy site from a quality site is a quick glance at the design. Yes, there are examples like Google and Craigslist that have become wildly successful despite (or because of) their sparse designs, but they are rare exceptions. Let’s be honest, at this point you’re desperate for a Summer internship. Still, you probably wouldn’t apply for an internship at a company whose website looks to be straight out of 1998. Bad web design is unprofessional. Judging from Viget Labs’ own site as well as those of their clients, there’s no need to worry about professionalism. Beyond design, Viget also helps their clients focus on creating “solid web strategies” and developing “functional applications that actually work” while leveraging “the latest online marketing tactics to grow their reach.”
Viget Labs works with two types of clients: web start-ups and offline companies. In either scenario Viget’s goal is to help the client build a web business. The services offered by Viget are focused in four distinct areas: Strategy, Design, Application Development, and Online Marketing. For each area of business, Viget has separate blogs which are named for what they help their clients do: Advance, Inspire, Extend, and Engage. Viget also has a general company-wide blog. These blogs are extremely useful for both researching the company and engaging with people who currently work at the company. Whether you’d like to learn more about what it’s like working at Viget or you’d like to interact directly with their CEO, leaving a comment on one of their blog is a surefire way to begin the conversation.
Since they’re such a web savvy company, there is a ton of information available about Viget on the web. Beyond the blogs there are Twitter accounts and Flickr pages. We also found this gem that answers one of the most important questions that you’ll have about Viget, especially if you’re going into an interview. How do you say Viget? Here’s a hint, it rhymes with “dig it.”
It should be no big surprise that Viget’s Careers page is outstanding. It’s not only beautiful, but it’s also loaded with helpful information and extremely easy to navigate. Beyond listing their job openings right on their Careers page (seems like common sense, but it often takes 3 or 4 clicks on other companies’ sites to get to actual job listings) they also talk about their benefits and link to a photo tour of their headquarters. These additions are right in line with Viget’s recruiting message:
At Viget — aside from all-you-can-drink sodas, a casual dress environment, flex hours, informal Wii bowling tournaments, free lunch on Fridays that doubles as our weekly staff meeting, regular industry or community gigs (some local, some not, thanks to a $2,500 per person conference/training budget), and team-building events like paintball or go-karts — you can expect to work in a culture of growth; one that fiercely protects integrity and respect as core values.
We also found a Viget recruiting mini-site called Team Viget which is focused on recruiting designers specifically. The only thing that we didn’t like on Viget’s site is that they have a really obvious HTML coding error on one of their internship descriptions. Viget is clearly one of the best at what they do, but having a paragragh tag inside a title tag on a site for a web development company looks really bad. Hopefully they’ll read this and fix it immediately.
It appears that Viget is still looking for Summer interns in two areas: Ruby on Rails Development and Web Design. Viget is planning on hiring a total of 4 Summer interns. One for each position in Durham, NC and Falls Church, VA. Despite the fact that Viget is totally on the ball when it comes to providing in-depth career related information, we can’t find any mention of whether or not the internships are paid. They are 40 hours a week for 8 weeks at the minimum, so we’d hope there’s some sort of compensation for all the hard work. At the very least you’ll get great experience in what appears to be a really fun work environment. They also say that they’re hoping these interns will turn into full-time hires, so an internship is probably the best way to work your way into entry-level employment at Viget.
Links to Help You Begin Your Research
What do you think of our design? Did it keep you from clicking the back button? If you’re reading this, we’re going to guess that it did, but leave a comment and tell us anyway.
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Willy - Thanks for profiling Viget! We’re excited to be featured on the internship site, too.
I thought I’d mention that the “recruiting” category on our company-wide blog includes several posts that an internship applicant might want to read. There are some basic pointers for how to make a good impression on us.
We fixed the HTML error you mention - thanks for pointing it out.
Thanks again for the great post!