My Work Experience at the National Trust
Thursday 06 March 2025
Reflecting on my work experience at the National Trust, and exploring what I learned from it!
Recently, I was lucky enough to have work experience with the National Trust's incredible IT Digital team. The team are responsible for the public-facing technology powering one of the UK's largest charities, and I was incredibly excited to find out everything they do!
Over the course of the placement, I was able to spend a day with four different areas of the team, exploring what they get up to and the general day-to-day activities of someone in that role. It taught me so much, and I wanted to reflect on what I learnt during my time there.
Web Operations
I have to admit, I didn't really know what web operations was - sorry Gemma!
However, I found my time learning about it really interesting. I'd never really given all that much thought to how huge websites like the Trust's work behind the scenes, and it was fascinating to be able to explore all the different layers which help to keep their site quick and secure for the millions of people who use it every year. Their use of kubernetes to ensure the website scales efficiently was also fascinating to learn about!
I also got a lot of ideas on how to tweak my own website, and in the process learn more about hosting applications using platforms like AWS.
Front End development
I found my day with Kevin in the Front End team fascinating too! It was really interesting to see how they use Figma to design everything from the ground up - every screen on their website has an mockup in Figma, meaning that a design can be tweaked easily before huge amounts of time are spent developing it! I'd played around with Figma before, but never really used it properly. However, learning how to use auto-layout and other features has helped me to build professional-looking designs in the application, and I've started using Figma more on my own side projects!
At the Trust, they have a huge focus on making sure their site is accessible to all. Having a sufficient colour contrast is important, ensuring that everyone can always distinguish between the foreground and background. As well as this, as part of the Trust's focus on sustainability, they work to reduce the imagery and colour palette on the site; this helps to increase the efficiency, meaning each visit to the site results in as few carbon emissions as possible.
Both of these are aims that I think are really important, and I want my website to move in the same direction. I recently changed the accent colour from orange to blue, as this creates a better contrast on a white background, improving my own site's accessibility.
Back End development
During my time with Adrian & Joe, I learnt about how the Trust websites are designed behind the scenes. Their motto is always "How can we do it better?", and their "Continous Improvement Continous Delivery" cycle helps to make this happen.
A number of different systems, including the Bloomreach CMS and property management software, feed into the website. Each page is generated when a change is made, and then cached for up to 15 minutes. All of this helps to make the site quick and efficient!
I found all this really interesting, and, when looking for a way to move off Netlify, chose to write my own Cloudflare Worker to process my contact form data.
On top of this, having never really considered caching before learning about it at the Trust, I've introduced Cloudflare caching onto my own site, with all pages being stored 'on the edge' to help speed up pages!
Testing
With Nick on my final day, I was able to explore how the Trust test their sites and applications, and ensure that nothing is broken for any of their users. Personally, I'd always assumed that testing just equaled a lot of spreadsheets, but boy was I wrong! They use a huge number of different programs and applications to automate a large part of their testing, meaning that hundreds of tests are carried out for every change to their website and application. The tests check everything, including accessibility requirements, ensuring that the Trust's site is always working just as it should. I've started running my own websites through a few of the tools they used, just to check that it displays as expected on all kinds of devices.
I'm so grateful to everyone at the National Trust for giving up their time to talk me through what they do, and I found my experience over the week incredibly valuable. In particular, I was fascinated by their focus on accessibility, which was something I'd never given a whole lot of thought to. It is incredibly important to ensure that the internet is as accessible as possible to everyone, so doing a few (pretty simple) things to help with that is something that we all should do! This was an absolutely fascinating placement, and has helped me immensely in my plans for the future. Thank you again to everyone there - you were all so welcoming, and made my week with you so brilliant.