BTS: How Two Design Nerds Created the Squarely Speaking Podcast🎙️
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Okay, so I'm sitting here thinking about how to capture EVERYTHING from our first ‘official’ podcast episode without boring you to tears while you read it instead of listen... but honestly? There's just so much good stuff! 🤷♀️
This is my –Katelyn’s– perspective, by the way (hi! 👋), and along with my podcast co-host Diane, we recently-ish launched Squarely Speaking to further explore our little corner of the internet where we geek out about web design, client management, Squarespace, and other nerdy things that we always find a way to make interesting.
So grab whatever you're drinking (coffee, wine, –that weird green smoothie– no judgment here), and let's dive into the episode recap!
Our Origin Stories: How We Got Here 🚀
Katelyn: My Nonlinear Path to Web Design & Freelancing
“Well, back in the 90s… –no, I'm just kidding.”
That's literally how I started telling my story in our episode, which gives you a pretty good idea of my millennial-ness, I guess. 😂
The real story starts around 2006 when I was fumbling through college with no clear direction, enrolled as an “Interior Design” major in the art department. I had this incredible advisor (which I've since heard is NOT common – lucky me!) who asked what I did for fun. When I mentioned I created and made digital things in my spare time, she immediately said, “Oh, you need to be a graphic designer.”
That was it! I switched my major and a few months later, I landed my first design job making a whopping $6.00/hr (which was more than minimum wage at the time, so I was actually proud of that!). I've been freelancing on & off since then – which, wow, is a LOT of years. I don't even want to do the math on that…
So I started in print design – branding, conceptual design, package design, designs for digital things too, but mostly printed stuff. I hit an annoyance-wall pretty quickly when dealing with clients, because of all the color-related headaches: “I got sick of it pretty quick, because you run into a lot of color-related issues. Screen calibrations and… clients are looking at it on their screen. I'm looking at it on mine. It's not the same colors…”
Being the detail-oriented person I am, I practically fell into web design by accident when my freelance stuff eventually needed a more official home on the web, and I began to build my own website. It quickly began to feel like the perfect fit though. I could dive into the weeds of projects and actually ENJOY being that meticulous. As I told Diane during our chat: “I was like, ooh, I have a reason to be diving in and going into the weeds of this thing... It's all the things that I like, plus none of the things that were bugging me” about print design.
Linda (one of our live viewers – hi Linda if you're reading this!) asked what helped me when I first started working for myself, and my answer was pretty straightforward: “Google University.” 🤓🧐 Unfortunately, my college-level art education did not include how to run an online business for freelance work… so, I was Googling everything & figuring it out as I went.
A screenshot of my first & only Etsy order in 2016. LOL
My Very Failed Etsy Shop Adventure
In 2015, I took my first real (read: “official”) swing at entrepreneurship by opening a Facebook page and an Etsy shop. Laughably, I only ever sold ONE product. It happened to be purchased on my birthday from a complete stranger, and then I shut the whole operation down because... well, it wasn't exactly thriving. 😬
During the live, someone asked: What was I selling?
Oh man, this is embarrassing. 🫣😂 I was working as an in-house designer at a print production company, which gave me access to all their printing materials at a discount & I could design it myself for free, so...
The one item I sold was a design of a simple David Bowie silhouette graphic (right after he died) –on a foam koozie, which is one of those things you put cans in to keep them cold. I mean COMPLETELY random, right? *shakes head*
The only mockup of the product I could find in my Etsy account.
Diane pointed out the obvious problem with my total-noob approach to e-commerce, before I could: “Your brand must have been all over the place then.” 😂 She’s absolutely right, too! There was “nothing unifying the story together.” No wonder it didn't work!
In 2016, I bought my first unaccredited (not from a college) “business” systems/processes course which probably cost around $297 or something, which felt MASSIVE at the time. I remember feeling, “like clammy hands, shaky.... ––Like, how am I going to make this back?”
Between courses from educators I found through Google searches, I cobbled together as much free value as possible from blog posts, business books, –anything I could get my hands on, until I could afford the next step up & whatever course that was to learn a very specific thing, one by one & stacking what I learned, implementing EVERYthing.
The Growing Pains Were REAL
When Diane asked about my biggest early challenges, there were so many, but the ones I remember most are:
Time management nightmare: “I had a full time job and it was like a 20 or 30 minute drive to and from that job. So another hour was wasted in the car. And then doing any work after that was nights and weekends. And I really didn't have a life.”
Zero business training: “They never taught me business specifically... They don't teach you how to create a business, how to run a business, how to manage a business, how to be a business owner, which is a totally different thing than being an employee.”
The self-design struggle: “It's hardest to design for yourself. It's harder, hardest to market for yourself.”
And the ISOLATION was kinda crushing: “If you don't have a network where you're, in the weeds with other people trying to do the same thing, it feels very awkward, even lonely... because you don't know who to talk to about it. You have no one to go to advice for and you feel really impostery about the whole thing.”
Diane immediately related to that isolation: “I didn't know anybody else who was running their own business. No one in my family ran their own business. Like, I was the only human being in the world in the universe who was trying to do this crazy thing. That's certainly how it felt.”
My Secret "Pivot" Strategy
When Linda asked in the chat, what I did differently when changing to what I'm doing now (referring to the changes in my service offerings), my answer was simple: “I basically just stopped offering or talking about the things that I didn't want to do anymore. And I took them off my services page. I stopped putting them as a listed item in the inquiry form. I stopped talking about it everywhere.”
The result? “I have clients now who have no idea that's my background. And I really just cut it out of my life, –like they were toxic.” 😂
Diane called that the “secret sauce” – just “stop doing the stuff you don't want to do anymore.” And Barb from our audience chimed in too, with “No one needs that toxic negativity, right?!” 😆🙌 EXACTLY.
Diane: From Unfinished Romance Novels to Building A Web Empire 🏙️
Diane's path couldn't have been more different from mine. She graduated with a degree in sociology and religion/philosophy, which she jokingly called “very practical.” 😅
She wanted to be a writer –really wanted to do that– joined writers' groups, attended conferences, took classes... but couldn't make it work financially & had trouble finishing the books she started writing.
Then came THE moment: “One day this girl came in and said, 'Oh, look at my new website. Isn't it amazing?' And she showed it to us. And I was like, 'that is the ugliest thing I have ever seen in my life.' And she was like, 'it only cost me $400.' And I was like, 'Hmm, maybe...'”
That's when the lightbulb went off: “I could do better than that and make more money than I was making writing unfinished romance novels.”
So she started building websites – first in Publisher (no shame!), then in Front Page (still no shame!). She got a few writer clients, then writers' organization clients, and people started paying her more and more.
Her Secret Weapon: Being a Jack of All Trades
What Diane loves about web design is how it combines so many different skills: “The cool thing to me about web design is that there's so many parts to it. Like you need to have an aesthetic sense and you need to be good at design, but then you also need to be techie and geeky and detail oriented, but you also need to be able to tell a good story. Cause guess what? That's what copy is and marketing is.”
For the first time, her varied background became an asset: “I'm good at all these things.”
Her hard work paid off BIG time. She became so successful that: “If you Googled 'Web design for authors,' I was number one or number two. There was this other designer who was... like it was amazing. I was getting clients from all over the world. Like I had clients in like Haiti and Canada and the UK and like everywhere, all over the place, like North Vietnam or Vietnam.”
When Google Changed Everything
Then came a major ‘plot twist’ (ha!) – Google changed their search algorithm: “They made, they localized them. So, if you Googled web designer and just web design for small business or whatever, I came up if they were in Denver, Colorado, even if they weren't an author.”
Suddenly she had inquiries from plumbers, financial advisors, and accountants who weren't writers. She had to expand her services quickly, and that's when her business really exploded “pretty much overnight.”
She built that WordPress web design business until 2015, sold it, did consulting for a few years, then “burned out pretty hard.” In summer 2022, she rediscovered Squarespace right after they launched Fluid Engine and started her current boutique web design business!
Why We're Both OBSESSED With Squarespace 💙
A question we see constantly in our industry: “Are you really a web designer if you're using Squarespace?” Our response: Do you want to produce a product that your client doesn't (hate), isn't afraid to death to break, and is not going to get hacked? It's not about the platform, it's about what you're handing off to the person.
Our clients aren't massive corporations with dedicated IT departments. They need to be able to:
Post their own blogs
Add events
Update pricing
Swap forms
Change photos
And Squarespace makes all of that POSSIBLE for them to do on their own.
If Squarespace stopped being this easy, then I would move over to something else. But having also used ShowIt, Webflow, Shopify, Weebly, and Wix – trust me when I say NOTHING comes close to how quickly you can turn around projects in Squarespace, and your clients don’t hang on for dear life because they aren’t obligated to just to maintain what you did for them.
Plus, I don't have to waste time on tedious design elements during the build: “I don't have to waste my time drawing a rectangle and putting text on top of it and linking the rectangle and linking the button and giving them both an animation and both a hover animation and then changing that on the mobile view... It's just a button. No.”
Diane’s WordPress Burnout
Diane couldn't agree more with my love of Squarespace.
She spent YEARS feeling guilty about recommending WordPress to clients: “I know how hard this is going to be for you to maintain. I know you're going to struggle to add a hyperlink for crying out loud. And I know it's going to break and I don't know when it's going to break because I don't know when the next WordPress update is coming out.”
The worst part, she says? “You're going to pay out the nose to have this thing that is going to be a thorn in your side for as long as you have this business.”
She felt trapped by WordPress: “I was like, this sucks, but it honestly [was] the best solution out there.”
When she discovered Fluid Engine on Squarespace, –everything changed: “I can almost give a client a site with no tutorials, no nothing, and they can update it now. They can't change out fancy things and maybe they struggle to, they might struggle with something more complex, but like changing text, changing an image, adding a page like you can almost do that with no help right out the gate.”
How The Squarely Speaking Podcast Was Born 🎙️
Our podcast journey started simply – we were both creating content for the same thing and realized: “Oh my god, this is so much fun. What if we did this more often? –And then it was like, what if we did this more often AND it took something else off our plate? We could just swap this out with something we were already gonna do anyway.”
What makes our dynamic work is that we're different in many ways but aligned on the crucial stuff: “We do things a lot of things differently, but we care about a lot of the same things. And there's a lot of mutual respect, between us because of that.”
Diane put it perfectly: “Katelyn's processes blow my mind. –I'm like, I cannot with that. It's like rocket science.” And I feel exactly the same way about hers! 😂 And I love that we have different approaches of tackling the same problem in a lot of cases.
But we agree on all the important stuff:
How to treat clients
Content layout
The storytelling of sites
Most importantly, we're both passionate about our work: “We really love our businesses. We really love our content. We really love what we do, and I think that's one of the things we appreciate about each other.”
Who We're Creating These Episodes For
While we LOVE beginners and want you here, we're also planning to dive deep into more advanced topics: “We both have been doing this almost 20 years. So we'll talk plenty about some more advanced like intermediate topics.”
We're planning episodes on:
Color psychology (we have a whole episode dedicated to this coming up!)
Font selection
The psychology of intake forms
Client relationships
As Diane put it: “lots of really good, deep stuff here” so expect to get NERDY with us!
WEB DESIGNER Q&A: Our Unfiltered Answers
For Shopify Development, How Do I Get My First Few Clients?
Diane’s take, from her current love-hate relationship with Shopify 😂: “Today is not the day to ask me. Today is not the day.”
But jokes aside, she emphasized that e-commerce sites generally command higher prices than service-based sites, so it's a good skill to develop if e-commerce interests you.
Her key advice:
Get a website, even just a one-pager
Know what sets you apart (USP) and who your niche is
Build 2-3 sites cheaply for your portfolio
Show examples of what you can deliver
Talk it up to EVERYONE
My take was simpler: “You can't operate a business in a void, and so the imposter syndrome cannot stop you from talking to people, telling people what you're doing. You have to tell people.”
And don't just mention it once – repeat yourself …A LOT: “To the point where it probably feels uncomfortable for you.”
Diane added: “You're not doing it right unless you feel like, ‘oh my god, I'm so pushy.’ Then you're almost there. Almost.”
The truth is, people aren't paying as much attention as you think & for our audience to see/hear us, we HAVE to repeat ourselves. We can’t just say it once or twice a month, because EVERYONE will forget what we said 3 days ago, 12 days ago, 27 days ago, 5.5 months ago… etc.
Think about all the REPEATED ads you see on TV, hear on the radio, see at movie theaters, or flashing on those super annoying WordPress Food Blogger websites. Even in promotions for business owners where they resend the same promotional emails for each product launch, –do you remember every word they said when they sent that email series 6 months ago? I seriously doubt it. 😆
As I said, “Nobody cares about what we're doing except for us.” They’re just trying to get through their days, weeks, and months like we are. “So nobody else is gonna notice that you're saying it seven times.” They're probably “only going to see it once.”
Would You Do Portfolio Sites For Free/Cheap?
Diane’s brilliant idea for how to charge for your first few services
Diane's brilliant pricing psychology: “I would put a reasonable price, maybe a newbie price. A lowish price, nothing super cheap or discounted because people assign a value according to what it costs them to get it. Always. It's human nature. We can't help it.”
Her strategy:
List a decent price for your services on your site, but then offer discounts when reaching out personally: “Or half off or 75% off or for $500 bucks or whatever. And so then when they go to your site and they see what you've built and what it's worth, it assigns that value in their head, that perceived value. ‘Oh, wow. Ooh, this is a $2,500 site. I can get it for $800 bucks! Heck yeah.’”
Katelyn’s thoughts on how to approach offering a few free website builds
A good reminder for doing ANY work for free is that –no matter the reason– it will devalue whatever you’re offering & the person you’re doing the work for may take advantage (intentionally or otherwise) of your time as a result. So you need to have excellent boundaries in place, and to make it VERY clear what the expected scope of work is, then HOLD that boundary.
It’s totally okay to do the work for free if that feels doable to you; that’s what I did too, but I did the work for close family members or friends and they did NOT take advantage of me or my time in that process. It was a great learning experience, and they were very respectful of me in the process, but that’s not always the case.
If you decide to so any work for free, here are some of my tips:
make SURE the ‘client’ knows that this is a service you WILL be charging $X for, but this is just the first or second build to learn the steps of the process if they’re willing to be patient with you as you work through the unknowns.
Talk to them and decide a very firm scope of work (items to be completed: Home page, About page, Services, Contact, etc), and how long you expect it to take.
Run it through the processes & timeline you want to use, and ask that they follow along with you as if this project was costing them your intended rate.
Set the expectations, and LEAD them through the project, even if you’re not 100% sure about how to do that. –Remember, they know even less about it than you do!
Can You Make More Money as a Squarespace Designer vs. as a Shopify Designer?
This myth is completely backward! E-commerce sites typically command higher prices: “I actually know a designer who charged $80,000 for a Shopify website. She said she'd never do that again, and I can't blame her, but it happens. I don't know any Squarespace designer that charged $80,000.” That $80k project took the designer nearly a year to complete, so for her, it wasn’t worth the money because it was such a big project that she couldn’t take on many other projects & the overall revenue for that year was lower than usual as a result. (Example: $80k x 1 = $80k, but $20k x 5 = $100k, and $30k x 5 = $150k)
Diane mentioned a Squarespace designer’s infamous $70,000 Squarespace site, but noted that's extremely rare. Most Squarespace sites cap around $20,000, while successful Shopify stores are often in the $20,000 - $30,000 range.
What's the Right Way to Scale to $5K/Month as a Web Designer?
Diane's simple but effective strategy: “Every three-ish clients, I would up your price 500 bucks.”
She started her first site at $2,000 in 2022, then went to $2,500 after two projects, and sold about five at that price while getting comfortable with Squarespace. Then every couple of sites, she'd add another $500. Now her custom sites start at $5,500!
My honest admission: I didn't change my prices for a long time, “and suddenly two years passed and I was still charging the same rate. So don't do what I did. Do it smarter!” 🤦♀️
Did You Struggle With Being Creative in the Beginning?
My ‘embarrassing’ truth: “Yes! Even creating the cover photo for my Facebook page, the logo for the profile picture, those kinds of stupid things took me ages. And I'm trained in this!”
My first website was a disaster: “I was designing like a 60-year-old man. It didn't represent me at all...”
My problem? Always being an in-house designer meant that what I wanted to design was never part of the equation in my past 9-5s, so I never fully developed my own style.
Diane's approach was more practical. When she started in 2006, web standards barely existed: “It was just whatever looks good kind of thing. And so I really just tried to make pretty things and I looked at what other people were doing.”
She created a swipe file of inspiration: “Every time I come across a site that I'm like, ‘Whoa, that's awesome,’ I'll save it.”
Diane never took formal design classes but focused on sites that were both beautiful AND functional – which is what she loves about design, versus pure art.
If You Woke Up Tomorrow & Had No Clients, No Money in the Bank, What Would You Do?
My initial less-helpful answer was: with my current audience, I'd create and sell something quickly to generate cash flow.
Diane's much more tactical approach, and more helpful to people with no audience yet: Create a special offer and start with every client you've EVER worked with, beginning with the most recent: “A lot of people make this mistake. They're like, ‘well, I just built that site for someone two months ago. They don't need me again.’ –No, no, no! You are fresh in their mind. You blew their minds. You did amazing things for them.”
After contacting past clients, reach out to professional contacts who know your work ethic, even if they don't that you are a designer yet: “Even if they don't know you as a designer, but they know you in another professional capacity, they know your friendliness with customer service, or they know that your excellence that with which you do things or that you're detail oriented... That is the perfect person to refer clients to you.”
How Do You “Convince” People to Pay $3K - $5K for a Website?
My philosophy is simple: “Never ever assume what's in your client's wallet.” That's why I list my prices on my website, –it filters out people who would need convincing.
Diane's refreshingly direct approach: “I don't. These are the prices. They work for you or they don't. Take it or leave it.”
The takeaway here is that we don't know clients' finances or priorities. “You don't have to worry about their financial stability!” That’s on THEM to decide; not us.
Diane learned this lesson the hard way: “When I did consulting and I was like a business coach, I ended up being like a business therapist, which was not fun... I took too much responsibility for my client's success.”
We both agreed that if you need to convince someone of your service’s value, they're likely going to be a problem client.
Diane also stressed how your marketing content can position you with clients BEFORE they contact you: “When somebody hears that and it resonates and they get on the phone with you, they immediately treat you differently.”
Can I Find Enough Clients if I ONLY Use Squarespace to Build Websites?
Our shared answer: HELL YES!
The proof is in clients' reactions when they see how easy Squarespace is to use. When working on Sam’s boudoir website in 2024, during our launch day call where I was showing her how to use Squarespace & update the site, I was also showing her how to up date the header navigation links so I said, “You literally just click on the page and drag it up into the Main Nav area, and let go.” –She was gobsmacked at how easy that was compared to her WordPress site. 😍
When their minds are blown, and they feel empowered to manage their own content (their own home on the interwebs), especially coming from WordPress, the clients who care about that kind of thing flock to Squarespace & designers who specialize in it. 🤷♀️😁
Do Clients Balk if We Don't Code it From Scratch?
No, not at all! As I emphatically stated: “Clients do not want a website that is coded from scratch. Not the public figures, single person entrepreneurs, small entrepreneur teams – none of them want a website you've custom coded from scratch.”
They may not know why they don't want it, but we certainly do! All they know is that those kinds of websites require a staff to manage them, and most small businesses or solopreneurs cannot manage that themselves. So our audience of smaller businesses does not want something they can’t understand or manage themselves, because they’re not large enough to have the budget for ongoing IT, help, design services, or to have an internal department of people with those skillsets to maintain a custom-coded site.
In fact, most are afraid of editing ANYTHING that looks like code! Even in Squarespace’s code areas, –and that’s totally understandable!
How Much Can You Charge as a Self-Taught, New Web Designer?
Diane's honest take: “The market will tell you.”
My practical advice: “You don't really know what people will pay until you ask for it. So until you list it, until you publish it, until you put it out there, –no one's paying attention.” Put your prices out there, and if they don't work, adjust: “If you put it out there at two and you don't get any clients, then change it again or check your messaging on the sales page. A lack of clients could be a result of all kinds of things including marketing efforts, mismatched or ineffective copy & messaging, unrealistic prices, no website traffic, etc.
However, I can tell you that I charged about $1,200 USD per website at first, being based in the US and working only with US-based clients in the beginning. To me, that felt SO expensive & made me a little uncomfortable, but I was confident that what they’d get for that rate was good for my skillset in 2016-ish. My hourly rate was about $25- $30/hr then, so for a 40-ish hour project, that was about right, for me.
Your rate may be different because your needs are different! Plus, it’s been 10 years since I built my first client website & there’s inflation to consider, etc.
So, if you’re hoping to get a “real” or flat number here, I can’t really give YOU that because it should be based on what country you’re in & what your niche is, what bills it has to cover (including taxes & paying yourself!), as well as what feels comfortable or uncomfortable to you!
What I CAN tell you is that if you decide to charge, say, $500 for your first website –it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever do that again. 😉😂
Coming Soon on The Squarely Speaking Podcast
We've got some amazing episodes planned, including:
A dedicated episode on color (which we've already started planning!)
Deep dives into font choice
Client management strategies
Pricing frameworks
how to use AI to create content for ‘fake’ portfolio sites
And so much more!
Whether you're just starting out or you've been designing for years, we're creating content that will help you level up your skills, grow your business, and find your unique place in the web design world.
So that's the completely unfiltered story of how Squarely Speaking came to be, and how Diane & I both started our businesses!
If you have questions you'd like us to tackle in future episodes, drop them in the comments or join us on our next live! We can't wait to build this community with you! 💛
Episode Transcript
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00:00 building and growing a successful web design business yeah we're very excited
00:05 so today so we have something kind of fun planned for today we have uh some Q&A planned and we actually have some
00:11 Q&A submitted too so we're going to have some we're going to have a lot of fun we've got some really really good questions in about how to get clients
00:19 how to streamline your business and your workflow and yeah there's a lot of fun stuff but we want to start out with a
00:25 quick intro about each of us we're actually going to use this uh episode as the first episode of our podcast when we
00:31 started on Spotify so we just wanted to take a minute and talk a little bit about each of us our backgrounds what we
00:37 do and how we got here and why we wanted to start this podcast so Caitlyn do you
00:42 want to go first sure that's that's a loaded question isn't it for People Like
00:47 Us yeah how did we get here how did we get here what happened well back in the 90s no I'm
00:55 just kidding um I went to college for design I
01:02 stumbled on it kind of accidentally um because I knew I wanted to be doing something creative but I had
01:08 a really good adviser um which I since heard of is not a common thing and she
01:13 was like well what do you like to do in your spare time and I was like well I I create things in Publisher for fun she's like oh you need to be a graphic
01:21 designer so that's kind of all she wrote that was 2006 is when I changed my major
01:26 and then um I got my first design job somewhere in that neighborhood to kind of outside of classes and I've been
01:33 freelancing ever since then so basically I've been designing since
01:38 2006 that's a lot of years I don't know how many but it's a lot it is it's a long time and you started up doing
01:46 print yeah I started out doing print branding conceptual design package
01:51 design all kinds of fun things I got sick of it pretty quick because you run into a lot of like color related um
02:00 issues screen calibrations and like clients are looking at it on their screen I'm looking at it on mine it's
02:06 not the same color it's so I got sick of that after a while um that's so
02:12 interesting that's fun that's gonna be fun to talk about when we do our color episode we have some fun things planned
02:18 for later in the year including an entire episode on color so anyway cool
02:23 back to that yeah so I'm a pretty detail oriented person I think web was a good fit for that specific ific reason I was
02:30 like o I have a reason to be diving in and going into the weeds of this thing
02:36 oh that's awesome yeah so it's like all the things that I like plus none of the things that were bugging me for the past
02:42 14 or so years when I switched over so and I just I can't I can't get excited
02:48 about those things those old things anymore webs where it's
02:54 at so you obviously love what you do now so obviously and this is part of what we bonded over and so you want to talk a
03:00 little bit about what you enjoy about doing this now yeah I mean it just kind of feels like I get paid to have a hobby
03:09 a I like I like to help people I was just talk on a call earlier today and he
03:14 was asking like how do I get started and it just feels really good to have that conversation be like yeah this is
03:20 possible I mean everybody's good at something so if you can find the thing that you're good at and if it crosses
03:26 over with money that you can also get from doing that thing then it's a really cool adventure yeah true story true
03:34 story awesome I love that well we have some funny comments in the chat so Linda says hi and then Walt's like wait I
03:41 started in the 90s right I relate to she said that and
03:47 I was like is that when I started I'm like is that but it's not quite but yeah
03:52 I I did amateure starts in the 90s like in Publisher before I knew designing was
03:58 a thing yeah for sure sure for sure um and Linda has a good question uh what helped you when you started working for
04:04 yourself Kaitlyn um Google University really oh wow yeah I started
04:13 in 2015 I opened a Facebook page and an Etsy shop I only ever sold one thing
04:21 happened to be on my birthday from a complete stranger and then I shut it down because not great
04:30 I didn't take a course or anything like that on business until probably 2016 and
04:36 then I took another one in 2019 so it's kind of a progression but mostly the first one I ever took was $297 just for
04:43 comparison we all know how expensive courses can be now that was that felt like a huge
04:49 investment I was gonna say it probably felt big oh it was like clammy hands
04:54 shaky like am I gonna make this back you know
05:00 so yeah in between all of that it was a whole lot of reading every blog post I could read and I started picking up
05:07 business books I mean it was like all the free thing most like what most people do as
05:13 much value as you can puzzle piece together for free until you can afford to do the next thing whatever that is
05:19 yeah for sure and uh Linda has another question what were you were you selling images on Etsy what were you selling on
05:25 Etsy oh no I was an in-house designer at a print
05:32 production company and they because of that I had access to all of the stuff that they printed on and I could design
05:40 the stuff and have them printed and so I was printing kind of ad hoc when I'd get
05:45 an order thankfully I didn't have stacks of these things because like I said I only sold one and actually it was uh
05:53 like a handdrawn thing of David Bowie's face right after he died so it was like uh Memoir or something what do you
06:01 call those like yeah it was a it was a koozie like a foam Koozie thing that you put your can in that's what it was like
06:09 completely random no wonder it didn't work right that's amazing yeah so you're
06:15 brand must have been all over the place than you were I mean that's it's hard to run a store yeah it's hard to run a store if there's nothing nothing
06:22 unifying the store together yeah yeah yeah no absolutely nothing that's
06:27 awesome okay I love that um uh Owen France here started in the 90s yes yes more of us started in the 90s
06:35 yes um okay so I know we're spending a little bit longer on this than than we
06:40 intended we were planning on this just being really quick but um I think this is going to be kind of interesting so what would you say in those kind of
06:46 early days were like the biggest challenges you were up against oh
06:55 um the first one would probably have to be time management because I had a
07:00 full-time job and it was like a 20 or 30 minute drive to and from that job so
07:07 another hour was wasted in in the car and then um doing any work after that
07:14 was nights and weekends and I really didn't have a life that felt like the biggest challenge for the longest period
07:20 of time um and then if that's ex like if we don't even talk about that because
07:26 that's kind of like Bal work life balance personal life stuff um oddly you go to like everybody's like
07:34 do I need a degree to do design and the answer is no because I have a near
07:39 degree I'm like six to nine credits shy of having one that's a different story
07:45 but they never taught me business specifically it's like it's all design
07:50 stuff it's like how to do the stuff so they don't teach you how to create a business how to run a business how to manage a business how to be a business
07:58 owner which is a totally different thing than being an employee of course and so
08:03 that that struggle of like and also it's hardest to design for yourself it's harder hardest to market
08:09 for yourself so that's like really just a mountain of
08:17 like all of the things that you don't know and all of the things that are hard all at the same time and if you don't
08:24 have a network where you're like in the weeds with other people trying to do the same thing it feels
08:31 very um lonely I guess because you don't know who to talk to about it you have no
08:36 one to go to advice for and you feel really imposter about the whole thing and yeah all of that was
08:43 hard oh my gosh I relate to that so much all of those but the the last one in particular because I didn't know anybody
08:49 else who was running their own business no one in my family ran their own business like I I was the only human
08:55 being in the world in the universe who was trying to do this crazy thing that's certainly how it felt so um yeah I
09:02 really I really relate to that too um and Linda said when you changed to what you're doing now what did you do
09:09 differently uh I basically just stopped offering or talking about the things that I didn't want to do
09:15 anymore and like I took them off my services page I stopped putting them as a listed item in in the uh inquiry form
09:23 I stopped talking about it and like I have clients now who have no idea that's my background yeah
09:30 and I really just kind of cut it out of my life like they were toxic
09:37 brilliant that's how you do it though right that literally that's the sauce that's the secret sauce yeah yeah justu
09:44 you don't want to do anymore yeah yeah very fun very fun I love it yeah
09:49 that's amazing um all right any any other thoughts I mean obviously we'll keep coming back to this kind of stuff any other thoughts before we I'll do
09:57 mine no no not that I can think I'm super curious about yours okay cool um Barb says no one
10:05 needs that toxic negativity right yeah absolutely right right um yeah yeah yeah
10:13 so I um so I graduated with a degree in sociology and religion philosophy which
10:21 was very practical and um I fancied myself I wanted to be a writer really
10:27 wanted to be a writer I loved writing and and stories and I just really wanted to do that and but I just couldn't make
10:33 it work I joined a bunch of writers groups and like I really I went to every writer's conference and everything and
10:40 took all these classes and just could not make a go of it and one day this girl came in and said um oh look at my
10:47 new website isn't it amazing and she showed it to us and I was like that is the ugliest thing I have ever seen in my
10:54 life and she was like it only cost me $400 and I was like hm
11:00 maybe right yes interesting I was like maybe I could make and I was like you like I've played around in Publisher all
11:07 the time I mean I'd never built a website or anything but like I certainly played around with graphic designning
11:13 things even though I don't even think I knew that term at that point but I was like I could do better than that and um
11:20 make more money than I was making writing unfinished romance novels so I was like okay let's give let's give this
11:26 a go and so I was like can I actually do this built a couple siton publisher no shame um then built a few in built a
11:33 bunch in front page actually um and uh you know got a few writer clients and
11:39 then got a few writers organization clients and then you know people started paying me more and more money and I was
11:44 like this is actually a successful little gig and uh and then Google changed their and I I learned about SEO
11:52 I kind of dove in same as you I was like oh I can geek out here and like the cool thing to me about web design is that
11:59 there's so many things there's so many parts to it like you need to have an aesthetic sense and you need to be good at design but then you also need to be
12:05 kind of techy and geeky and detail oriented but you also need to be able to tell a good story because guess what
12:10 that's what copy is and marketing is and so there's there's all these pieces that were fascinating to me that I was good
12:16 at and for the first time my um Jack of all trades master of none sort of like
12:23 mentality and experience of life like was going to pay off I was like oh I'm good at all these things um
12:29 and so yeah I kind of dived into it and I I got to beware if you Googled web
12:35 design for authors I was number one or number two there was this other designer who was yeah like it was amazing I was
12:41 getting clients from all over the world like I had clients in like Haiti and Canada and the UK and like everywhere
12:48 you know um all over the place like North vietn or uh Vietnam I had clients in Vietnam I had clients in uh um I mean
12:56 all over the place so anyway so I really loved doing that but then Google changed
13:02 their search results and so instead of they made they localized them so uh if
13:10 you Googled web designer and just web design for small business or whatever I
13:15 came up if they were in Denver Colorado even if they weren't an author and so now all of a sudden I have all these
13:20 people who don't want to read emails and they they're not writers but they're like plumbers or financial advisors or
13:28 accountants and I kind of just had to expand my business and start you know building webs again you have to learn
13:34 how to you know service all these different kinds of people and then that was when my business really started to take off it really it got really big
13:41 pretty much overnight um and yeah that was that was my story and oh but it was
13:47 WordPress okay yes so I was I pretty quickly I moved into WordPress hated WordPress I really
13:54 didn't like it even the whole time I was working in it I didn't like it it's it doesn't give a good customer experience
13:59 for most small businesses um and so I sold that in 2015 did Consulting for a few years burnout
14:06 pretty hard and then ReDiscover rediscovered Squarespace right after they uh launched fluid engine in uh when
14:15 was that 2022 yeah 2022 summer of 2022 and I um I
14:20 thought maybe I can hang out a a shingle again and do this again and uh and that was when I I started this this business
14:27 this little Boutique business that's cool I have a secret oh so when I
14:33 was a kid I don't know like middle schoolish my best friend and I used they
14:39 had those like spiral notebooks and we this is so we we went to
14:47 football games and like all these other stuff with our families and whatever and we were that was not our thing so we'd
14:53 take our little spiral notebooks and we would write stories in the spiral notebooks like fiction stories really
15:01 yeah we would read each other's stories how much fun so I don't know if I'd fancy myself
15:09 a writer but at one time I was doing a whole lot of writing for no apparent reason that's amazing oh my God more
15:16 stuff we have in common how much fun and do you find like that's it's a skill I feel like that's a skill that's needed
15:22 in web design like there's a story to how people walk through the site there's a story to how you develop like the
15:29 brand for your client I it's useful yeah it is it's it's a different way to think
15:35 about it for sure I love that that's amazing how much
15:41 fun okay so um yeah let me guys let me know if you guys have any questions about my background or anything but
15:47 that's kind of how we got here do you want to talk a little bit about why we love Squarespace so muchal say yeah
15:53 WordPress is very love haate it's always kind of been that way yeah for sure uh
15:59 for me the well the main question everybody asks is like are you really a
16:05 web designer if you're using Squarespace and I hate that question
16:11 because do you want to produce a product that your client doesn't isn't afraid to
16:18 death to break is not going to get hacked like it's not about the platform
16:24 it's about what you're handing off to the person and the market that we're in is is not like we're not working with IBM
16:31 we're not working with apple like they have dedicated teams departments for this kind of thing the people that we
16:36 work with need to be able to post their own blog they need to add their own event they need to update the pricing
16:43 they need to swap out the form on their contact page swap out the photos if we make it easy for them then
16:50 it doesn't matter what the platform is if Squarespace stopped being this easy then I would move over to something else
16:55 like so I do love Squarespace because it is easy the other platforms I have used are
17:02 show it web flow Shopify um Weebly oddly a little bit in
17:09 Wix none of them are so quick to turn something
17:15 around Squarespace makes it so incredibly easy that it's it can become a volume thing for us if we want to um
17:22 but also I don't have to waste my time drawing a rectangle and putting text on
17:27 top of it and linking the rectangle and linking the button and giving them both an animation and both a hover animation
17:33 and then changing that on the mobile view because that's only styled in the I don't want to do that it's just a button
17:39 like no right so Squarespace has its design
17:44 limitations but also it's time-saving and it's more time efficient because of those things and it's so much easier I
17:52 can't agree with all of that enough and it's so much easier for the client that's the thing that really gets me is I I especially when I'm moved into
17:59 Consulting and I worked so closely with all my clients I've always felt bad recommending WordPress to them because
18:04 I'm like I know how hard this is going to be for you to maintain I know you're gonna struggle to add a hyperlink for
18:10 crying out loud and I know it's going to break and I don't know when it's going to break because I don't know when the
18:16 next WordPress update is coming out and so and you're gonna pay out the nose to
18:21 have this thing that is going to be a thorn in your side for as long as you have this business I'm so sorry the best
18:28 I can do is make it pretty you know like that was how I felt about it and so when
18:34 I found Squarespace and and discovered fluid engine and you know the reason I worked in Squarespace is it was the only
18:40 gig in town if you wanted to grow a serious business in my opinion I was like I was like WordPress is the way to
18:46 go because it was customizable and it was you I felt stuck with it you know I'm like this sucks but it honestly is
18:53 the best solution out there and when I found fluid engine I was like wait
18:59 oh my goodness like I can almost give a client a site with no tutorials know
19:07 nothing and they can update it now they can't change out fancy things and maybe
19:13 they struggle to you know they might struggle with something more complex but like changing text
19:20 changing an image adding a page like you can almost do that with no help right
19:25 out the gate and that feels so good to to me so yeah so that's why we we love
19:32 Squarespace yeah it's almost like feeling chained to your desk but with every client if you can't literally just
19:39 hand it off and be like okay a lot of this you can maintain yourself that means they not coming back to you to
19:45 like change out a phone number change out an email address things that are so fast that maybe you might feel a little
19:52 bad charging an hour to do something that takes two seconds yeah yeah or finding time in
19:58 your calendar for something that takes two seconds all of that's just not what I want to do right um okay so a little
20:05 bit about why we wanted to do this podcast you and me yeah um well it
20:11 started because we're both in Paige Brenton's world and we needed to do some content and then when we started doing
20:18 the content we were like oh my God this is so much fun what if we did this more often and then it was like what if we
20:25 did this more often and it took something else off our plate we could just SW this out with something we were
20:30 already going to do anyway and [Laughter] thus the podcast was born what would you
20:39 say you know yeah so definitely for sure that we both were like oh my gosh we this is like a such a fun way to create
20:45 content we're in um and and such a good way to connect with other people you and
20:51 I both are so passionate about this work because we really love it we love our businesses we really love our clients we
20:56 really love what we do and I think that's one of of the things we appreciate about each other and and one of the reasons you and I both have a
21:03 pretty high standard for excellence I would say it's funny we do things a lot of things differently but we care about
21:09 a lot of the same things and and there's a lot of mutual respect I think between us because of that and so like from the
21:16 get-go it was like oh we we have a lot of things to talk about and we can talk about all the ways that we're different
21:21 and all the ways we do things differently because like Caitlyn's processes blow my mind I'm like I cannot
21:27 with that it's like rocket science and yours blow my mind and I cannot and it feels like rocket science but I love
21:34 that right right right right but there's so many things that we're like we really agree with how to treat clients we agree
21:41 with like how to lay out content on sites we agree with like the storytelling of sites there's so many things that we're in alignment on and I
21:47 was just like I know if we get together and talk that um we have a lot that we can contribute to people and um and it
21:54 would be fun too to grow a little community of people who wanted to come and and talk to us in this way and get questions answered and stuff because we
22:01 we really like the live aspect too so yeah yeah and I would say too we we did
22:07 want to talk about this is that um if you're beginner web designer we love you we want you here we're going to talk
22:12 about tons of stuff that I think is going to help you because we want to talk about like how to get clients and how to grow your business and all that
22:17 stuff but we are very geeky and we both have been doing this almost 20 years so we will talk plenty about some more
22:25 advanced like intermediate topics that's kind of who we have in mind for our audience because we're going to go deep
22:31 into color and we're going to go deep into font choice and we're going to go deep into like the psychology of the
22:36 intake form that you have on your site and how you work with clients and um so lots of really good deep stuff here so
22:44 um we have some really fun stuff planned for the rest of the year but this session we really wanted to talk about
22:51 um we really just wanted to do a Q&A so we were both part of an event last year where people submitted questions um
22:59 web designer submitted questions and there were so many good questions in the group that Caitlyn and I copied all
23:04 Caitlyn actually copied all the questions and we were like this is content we're gonna we're gonna go
23:10 through these um so so we're gonna dive into those and if you have questions you
23:15 want to answer drop them in the chat uh we will answer those and give you guys priority but we have a whole list and we
23:21 have some that are pre-submitted um and lka Leica commented said really hoping
23:26 I'm close to where you Gs are in two years find a PB student Bes you to do things with
23:32 yes totally you can do it yes absolutely so doable so much fun all right um what
23:39 was our pre-submitted question you want to start with that one sure uh they actually submitted three I think so
23:46 we'll start with one um I have the acquired skill of Shopify development
23:51 but I don't know how to get clients can you help me get can you help me with that can I get my first client awesome
23:59 you're in Shopify right now what are your thoughts today is not the day to
24:04 ask me today is not the day I do also um I'm expanding to work in Shopify and right
24:11 now we're in a little bit of a LoveHate relationship with Shopify so we'll I might have nicer things to say next
24:16 month I'm mostly kidding but um so if you've got some Shopify experience I would say number one go you there's a
24:23 there's a really good Market there there's a lot of good money to be had um in the e-commerce world would say
24:29 generally uh e-commerce sites Garner a lot more money than service-based sites
24:34 which is what Squarespace has really aimed at would you agree with that Caitlyn yeah for sure so um so go you so
24:42 that's great you're you're you're building a really good skill set um I would say number one is you need a
24:47 website of your own I know that a lot of people say that you don't have to have a website of your own but I would I would
24:53 get like a one-pager up um so that you can start at least talk a little bit about what you do and I would try and
25:01 you know the key to building a good site I'm going to try and not make this a 30- minute answer to this question I
25:08 know it's a looned question right it is long answer right so the key to building
25:13 any good site and this is especially true for you as a web designer is you've got to know what sets you apart from your competition and you've got to know
25:19 who your Niche is now those two things and this is what I Yammer on about all the time is those two things fit together like a puzzle piece those two
25:26 things fit together perfectly so the the thing that sets you apart and makes you unique and that gives people a reason to
25:32 choose you over another Shopify designer fits like a puzzle piece with your Niche
25:37 and the primary pain of the demographic you want to go after and so to give you an example like if somebody really wants
25:45 like if if you're if your gift if the thing you're really good at is like building beautiful Shopify sites then
25:51 your right person your Niche are going to be people who are really looking for gorgeous sites and so that needs to be
25:57 in your copy so even if you have a one-page website you talk up that thing
26:02 that really makes you amazing and you talk about the people that you're here to serve within for example I'll tell
26:07 you if you go to my site I talk about results oriented I talk about like because I pride myself on knowing copy
26:13 on knowing marketing strategy because I've been doing this for so long um and my people my ideal clients are people
26:20 who want that so um so I would say you need a website where you need to be
26:25 talking up those two things other than that um like start building some sites for
26:31 people on the cheap if you can so you have at least two to three sites in your
26:37 portfolio even if it's just a section on your onepage website where you can point to this is the kind of work that I will
26:44 do for you so it's not just your uspn Niche but it's examples of this is what I can
26:49 deliver and then you just get out there and you tuck it up you give it to everybody you know and I can give you more spec I can give you actual specific
26:55 strategies on actually how to get clients but I'll stop Kaitlyn do you want to add anything to that that was the thing that I was going to say like
27:02 you can't you can't operate a business in a void and so the impostor syndrome cannot stop you from talking to people
27:09 telling people what you're doing you have to tell people that's how you get your first few clients in my experience
27:15 it is it is and if you want a framework for that friends and family everybody
27:21 and literally I would go to your phone I would go to who you've texted and recently or not and if you are an
27:26 introvert like me and you're is these are my two friends and then a whole bunch of like two Factor authentication
27:33 like verification like that's everything in my phone um go through your phone go through your text messages go through
27:39 your contacts and literally tell everyone tell everyone tell if there are a few people you don't talk to tell 90%
27:47 really go for it then go through Facebook then go through Twitter whatever social media you're active on
27:53 and send some direct messages um then if you're on Facebook like I would go into groups and start you know dropping hints
28:00 and we can get more into the psychology of how I would do that too because Caitlyn and I have talked about that but we that's probably enough on this one
28:07 question and I would also say not just once like you have to talk about it and repeat yourself a lot a lot yeah to the
28:17 point where it probably feels uncomfortable for you oh yeah oh yeah you've got to feel you're not doing it
28:22 right unless you feel like very sleazy like you got to oh my God I'm so pushy then you're almost there almost yeah
28:31 nobody cares about what we're doing except for us so nobody else is gonna notice that you're saying it seven times
28:37 they're only gonna see it once oh it's so true you you you can talk about stuff
28:43 on your like I send my newsletter all the time all the all the time all the time all the time I'm always I feel like
28:48 I'm yelling at people all the time about all the stuff I'm doing I can't tell you how many people come to me and say I always miss your lives I I always I
28:55 don't know when they are and the whole thing and I'm just like cuz I'm not doing it enough you think that you're
29:00 being way more obnoxious than you are so really get it out there y um and Barb
29:06 says Barb ask would you do those for free or at a very low cost I would just to get the business I'm very much a fan
29:11 of um here's how I would do it on your site
29:19 I would put a reasonable price maybe a newbie price a lowish price nothing
29:25 super cheap or discounted because people assign a value according to what it cost them to get it always it's human nature
29:32 we can't help it so I would assign a pretty decent value but then when I reached out to people oneon-one I would
29:38 say to build my portfolio I am doing these at half cost so or half off or 75%
29:44 off or for 500 bucks or whatever and so then when they go to your site and they see that you what you've built and what
29:50 it's worth it assigns that value in their head that perceived value oh wow
29:55 oh this is a $2,500 side I can get it for $8 00 bucks heck yeah and then
30:00 that's how I would do it yeah yeah I agree um the follow-up question or a
30:07 statement I guess is there's a myth as a developer you can make less money as a Shopify developer than a Squarespace
30:12 developer which is actually the reverse I think of what we were just talking about earlier so I think that must be
30:20 platform specific in every uh and every platform like webflow must have their own show it must have their own Shopify
30:26 must have their own score space has it own but they're apparently all myths because that's not true yeah I actually
30:33 know a designer who charged $80,000 for a Shopify website right she said she'd
30:38 never do that again and I can't blame her but it happened I don't know any
30:44 Squarespace designer that charged $80,000 I know a few that charged 20 but I don't know anybody that charged 80 I
30:51 think Sam Crawford's his claim to fame his Squarespace site was 70,000
30:58 so that's pretty close but that's way above anything I've ever heard I for most Squarespace sites I think you start
31:03 to hit a cap around like 20 yeah for sure even though 20 is nothing to seize
31:09 that but it's not it's and Shopify like for shop for good for a successful store
31:14 that's really selling like 20 to 30 grand is more like the standard yeah
31:20 that's what I've seen too the last question sorry go ahead no yeah wealth had a thing and add if you don't need a
31:27 website let me know yes yes yes yes waltt such a good point thank you for saying that yes um if you don't need a
31:33 website let me know if you someone else who needs a website that's almost a better approach so instead of reaching
31:39 out to people and saying do you need a website reach out to people and say hey I'm doing a thing do you know of anyone
31:46 who needs a website because then it's not on them and they don't feel like they immediately need to be like no leave me alone um you're saying do you
31:53 know of anyone and almost always almost everybody knows somebody who needs website so better approach I actually
32:00 did that too yeah that work that got me the first two or three I think that I and they ended up being people I knew
32:06 but I didn't ask them directly I was just like hey this is what I'm doing do you know anybody that needs one and
32:12 they're like actually I want one nice that's where they came from
32:18 nice um the third question the last question that was presubmit what should be right what should be the right way to
32:24 scale so that I can get 5K a month consistently
32:29 I would just up your price um every uh what do you think three-ish clients I
32:36 would up your price 500 bucks yeah yeah I didn't do that and
32:41 suddenly two years passed and I was still charging the same rate so like don't do what I did do it
32:49 smarter yeah that's what that's what I did I started when I started in 2022 I
32:54 um I started my first site was 20 my first first it was 2,000 cuz I wouldn't
32:59 even sure I wanted to do it I was like I don't even know if I'm getting back into this and uh the first one I sold was
33:06 2,000 and then and then I I think I sold two at that price and I uped it to 2500
33:13 and I sold I think five at that price because I was still getting my feet wet do I like Squarespace do I like doing
33:18 this and then it was like yeah and then like every two sites I up at another 500 bucks yeah that's the easiest way to do
33:25 it it it feels a lot more daunting if you go from two to four yeah for example yeah yeah yeah yeah because
33:33 every Leap it was it doesn't feel that scary and then someone pays it and you're like well I can't lower it now
33:39 okay and you know yeah and so and my my custom sites now start at 55
33:45 so yeah cool yay all right do you have one you want
33:52 to start with from the pre the other pres submitted sure
34:00 um I like the I like the first one um did did you struggle initially with
34:05 being like artsy or did you find that design came to you naturally what would you say was your initial learning curve
34:11 to get your business going in terms of design stuff that's a great question isn't it I
34:17 like that one too honestly going back to being the hardest person to design for I
34:25 had when I started freelancing even creating the cover photo for my
34:32 Facebook page the logo for the profile picture like those kinds of stupid things took me
34:40 ages like and I'm trained in this I know conceptual design and like all of the
34:47 design principles and elements and I know how to use illustrator and all of the things and yet somehow my first
34:54 website turned out it was like I I was designing it as a
35:01 60-year-old man like it had it didn't represent me at all I I think that's because I was
35:08 always an in-house designer and so I was always designing for like clients and what I wanted was never part of the
35:15 equation right so I never developed my own style so my biggest part was how do
35:21 I represent the creativeness that I feel the artsiness that I I'm not very art
35:27 I'm more Desy so it was like what does that look like on in digital I had no
35:33 idea clearly fun what was your what would you say um
35:40 that's so interesting I just want to underline your point that point there about how different print and digital
35:46 are when I started building websites and then people would come to me and like be like can you make a brochure and I'd be
35:52 like sure can you create a t-shirt just yeah no problem and it took me a while
35:58 to be like oh my God this is a whole different Beast like I and now I'm like I don't touch anything that's print I I
36:04 only do digital it's such a designing for another medium is such a different
36:09 thing so anyway it really is um for me I
36:15 just I mean the other thing for me so when I started out so it was 2006 when I started building sites and so it was
36:22 really early in web days so there really weren't a lot of standards and so it was kind of just like whatever looks good
36:27 kind of thing um and so I really just like tried to make pretty things and I
36:33 looked at what other people were doing and I googled I was building for authors so I Googled a lot of authors and writer
36:38 groups and just really tried to kind of mimic what I saw and um and I still do
36:43 that to a certain degree I have a swipe file of like every time I come across a site that I'm like whoa that's awesome
36:50 um I'll save it and then I use those I'll go back and revisit the whole folder as uh when I'm looking for design
36:57 inspiration and stuff but um I never took a class on it or anything I think I
37:02 just I tried to look at what I saw on other sites that I felt worked that I
37:08 thought was both pretty and functional which is one of the things I really love about being a designer and one of the reasons I never really gravitated
37:14 towards being an artist is I love the functionality of pretty things and when
37:19 pretty things are made for function um to accomplish a goal so every time I saw
37:26 that and I saw somebody doing that particularly well I was like oh yeah and then I would just try and learn from
37:31 them that's essentially what I ended up doing too it was like okay now I need to do a website
37:42 and there was nothing else it was just like right where do I start do I code it
37:47 from scratch I don't know how to code like right right for sure banners
37:53 galleries images logos oh right okay so now let's now let's do the
38:00 best question the best question of all time I think I think we need to do like a I need to do a whole separate video just on this but if you woke up tomorrow
38:07 morning with no clients and no money in the bank what would you do oh that's a
38:12 very intelligent question is that awesome i' love that one if I woke up
38:17 tomorrow with no clients and no money in the bank I would well it depends on the
38:24 situation for me I have an audience so even if I had no clients and no money in the bank I could
38:30 make something pop it up to sell tell them about it and sell something that's
38:35 what I would probably do but if I didn't have an audience create a product or a service and send it to your list
38:42 yep what would you do um I would come up with a special or
38:49 a sale something Buzzy something fun something
38:54 compelling um and a good bargain and uh and I would start with that list
39:00 that we were talking about earlier I would start with every client I'd ever worked with ever in the history of all
39:06 time and I would start with the most recent I think a lot of people make this mistake they they're like well I just
39:12 built that site for someone two months ago they don't you know need me again or
39:17 whatever and it's like no no no you are fresh in their mind you you blew their minds you did amazing things for them
39:23 you're fresh in their mind if that that's the perfect time to reach out and see if they know somebody who might need
39:28 this new thing um or if it's an upsell so like I offer a design subscription
39:34 package so a lot of people work with me they buy a site they love me love what I did love their new site they're super
39:40 excited and they're like oh god well I just got to get this freebie up there and you know I gotta like update my
39:46 LinkedIn and all these things and I'm like you know I do unlimited graphic
39:52 design for a month for 1,500 bucks if that sounds good to you and you know I'll just build all that stuff for you
39:59 and you just put it in the Trello board give me your to-do list and I will make all of that happen and um and that's a
40:05 really good thing to offer to somebody who even if they just gave you a ton of money you know so um anyway so yeah
40:11 that's what I would do I would reach out to all past clients then I'd reach out to anybody that I'd ever worked with in any capacity and I'll tell you even if
40:18 you worked with them on another job even if they don't know you as a designer but they know you in another professional
40:24 capacity they know your um um friendliness with customer service or
40:30 they know that your Excellence that with which you do things or that you're detail oriented or whatever whatever it is that you brought to that job they
40:36 know you went through that lens that is the perfect person to refer clients to you um so yeah that's what I would do
40:43 and then just work through contacts until until I had five grand in my pocket that is way smarter than my
40:51 answer well I've had to do that a time or two so I've got a system
40:57 well I mean if you think about it if you don't have an audience when you first got started that's probably what I was
41:03 doing too because i' just be like hey we worked together we had fun do you have
41:08 anything else yeah what do you need help with right now what can I help you with and that I would get little projects out
41:14 of that so in reality that's probably a more helpful answer to where people are
41:21 in the beginning because if you don't have an audience then you can't ask them to do anything yeah you can't rely on
41:27 that yeah for sure um awesome okay so next question how do you convince people to
41:34 pay you three to5 thousand for a site it seems like such a large price for small
41:41 businesses I don't remember who said this but I want to say it was like Chris
41:46 from the future or James wedmore or some really smart person never ever I think
41:53 it was Chris never ever assume what's in your client's wallet yes yes and that
41:58 was that was really helpful for me because what feels like expensive to
42:03 us I mean if they're asking you about it presumably they've seen your prices like
42:09 they they already know that that's what one of the big reasons why I say list your prices because that cuts out the
42:15 people that you have to convince what are your thoughts on that
42:20 I don't right I don't these are the prices they work for you or they don't mhm take
42:28 it or leave it you know it's and I love that I love that um yeah stay out of their bank account you don't you don't
42:34 know you don't know what money they have or don't have you don't know what's important to them or what
42:40 their priorities are and that's not your job you don't have to worry about their financial stability my God I I say from
42:48 experience because when I did Consulting and I was kind of like a business coach I ended up kind of being
42:56 like a business therapist which was not fun and the reason I burnt out is because I took too
43:04 much responsibility for my client's success and like you don't have to do
43:10 any of that you don't have to get into any of that so yeah I just don't I don't I don't convince anyone of anything ever
43:16 this is the price this is what I do it's worth it to you or it's not and if it's not peace love you know find somebody
43:24 else find somebody else yeah find your perfect person I'm rooting for you you know yeah I think the dangerous thing
43:30 there is that if you have somebody that's a potential client that you need to convince they're going to be a red
43:35 flag client most likely because they don't see your value right from the beginning they don't see maybe not your
43:42 value specifically but the value in what you're doing the value and the tool that you're using the service you're
43:47 providing like all of that's missing and so you don't really want to work with that person because it's not going to be
43:52 fun right right that's really true and and I want to say something else there's
43:58 something else on this that's really important so when you start when you get to the point when you get some cash flow in um I just asked this question in my
44:06 Facebook group I was like what comes first money or um sales cash flow sales cash flow or marketing and every or
44:12 branding and everybody's like branding branding branding branding and I'm like not always sometimes sales is
44:18 first you know sometimes it's like I need money in the bank but anyway um
44:24 anyway the the point of all that is when you get to the point that you're actually doing some marketing and you're
44:30 starting to get a little strategic and you want to get some content out in the world the way you get content out in the
44:35 world starts to establish your relationship with your clients before they even get on a discovery call and so
44:42 it's really important in those initial in that marketing content that
44:48 you position yourself as an expert and that you're you know everybody's like give value give value give value and
44:53 it's like yes that's important but you really want to position yourself as an authority so you want to take a stand on
44:59 something you want to talk about the stuff that pisses you off that's a great topic that's a great source for content
45:05 if you're talking about stuff in your industry or with even with your competitors that annoy you and piss you off it points to something you value
45:13 which is a great way to create a bond with your followers and with your customers and here's the thing you go on
45:19 a rant or you take a stand or you're like this is how this should be this is like this is what your website should
45:25 look like or I have had it with those ugly Shopify sites you don't have to put up with that anymore you get to have a
45:30 gorgeous Shopify site or whatever your USB is and you go on a little rant about it when somebody hears that and it
45:37 resonates and they get on the phone with you they immediately treat you differently they are not treating you
45:43 like a store clerk they're not treating you like you know somebody that okay so
45:49 why okay but so you're charging so much money that seems outrageous to me like why should I pay that you have to convince me to pay you it's like it's no
45:55 no no click you know no like they get on the phone with the right attitude and in and that establishes it right out the
46:02 get-go so sorry that was a long answer but no that was perfect I love all of that that's so true so true right okay
46:10 next question do you feel there are enough clients to be able to just offer servfaces for Squarespace and not other
46:16 platforms hell [Laughter] yes yeah right for sure people that I've
46:24 pulled off of like WordPress and stuff and when we do their like offboarding uh what do you call that like the tutorial
46:31 call where I'm showing them how to you they're like so if I want to put a page in my main navigation I'm like you
46:37 literally just click and drag and let go and she's
46:43 like so I'm just saying yeah yeah stick with square space you don't have to
46:48 Branch out yeah yeah yeah I know people who do it's not required no okay um
46:57 okay and yeah this was this was a question somebody asked that I think is kind of interesting if the client ask you tell them what website what platform
47:03 you design on is there a stigma for using Web Design Software instead of coding it from scratch and I'm like heck
47:08 no I think we've talked about that but no I I mean you
47:13 clients clients do not want a website that is coded from not not the like
47:19 public figures single person entrepreneurs small entrepreneur teams
47:24 nobody none of them want a website custom coded from scratch they don't
47:30 they don't know why they don't want it I can tell them why they don't want it
47:35 right and I just I have to do a quick shout out Walter said how do I make those tables look good back when we were
47:41 talking about websites and tables and like yeah I feel you I feel you friend
47:47 okay and so emise has a question how much how much can you charge as a
47:52 self-learner I mean so how how do you know if you're good enough to charge $2,000 as a beginner I mean the market
47:59 will tell you that's my short answer what would you say Kaitlin that's kind of what I was gonna say like you don't really know what people will pay until
48:06 you ask for it but also you probably shouldn't ask so until you list it until you publish
48:13 it until you put it out there no one's paying attention to you so if you put it out there at two and you don't get any
48:19 clients then take it down to 1,800 or whatever and see what happens it can
48:24 fluctuate and I'm really a fan of of establishing that perced value by
48:29 putting a higher price on your site somewhere public so you know even if you just say sites start at so like if you
48:36 want to if you want if you want to charge $2,000 for your websites I would say sites start at 2500 or 3,000 and
48:44 then I would go to everybody and I would be like huge deal help me build my portfolio like I'm just starting a
48:50 business and you know I'm going to offer it to you for 1,500 bucks or whatever 1,700 or whatever and then uh a how I
48:57 would do it yeah that's that's called price anchoring we went down this rabbit hole with the future Chris from the
49:03 future talking about that so if they see very quick lesson if they see the larger
49:08 number first then they're anchoring to that and then suddenly the price that would have otherwise seemed too
49:14 expensive now seems very cheap because they saw the most expensive thing first and the least expensive thing second
49:20 right so when you're messaging people that's such a good point thank you um when you're messaging people you don't say I'm offering websites for, 1500 you
49:28 say I'm offering websites for half off or $1,000 off or whatever and then you
49:33 link to your site where it's listed so they don't have a number in mind until they see the full site and then they have to do the math
49:40 yeah that's a really good way that unfortunately that psychology works in Reverse too so if you like you were just
49:47 saying I'm offering them half off for X like if you say that number that lower
49:53 number they're going to remember that yep and that's the one that they're going to Anchor to unfortunately so
49:59 that's true yeah and wall has a good point big businesses don't want it coded either they just don't know or don't
50:05 want to admit it it's so true because at the end of the day it's like you don't want a site you have to babysit yeah
50:11 yeah not unless you're Target or somebody that has bules of people to manage it right all right next question
50:19 how is everyone finding their clients um I'm finding from Google and
50:27 YouTube been that way for many years where are you finding
50:33 yours well I would say talk about that a little bit because you've got a strategy for your content and how you've built
50:38 that up yeah it I mean long term um
50:43 everybody that asked me this question where do you get how do you get people from Google and YouTube and I say
50:50 blogging and they're like oh so you're you're good at SEO and I don't know that I would say
50:56 that I I know what to do but doing it is a different thing and this this big body
51:02 of content existed before I knew what to do and so when you scan that with
51:08 something like SEO space don't do it don't do it but also do it because
51:13 you're going to see that I don't have a very good rank or score or whatever with SEO space and
51:19 yet the thing that's most uh most important is the content and how helpful is it and is it answering questions
51:25 people are actually looking for and I check all of those boxes so even though I'm not great at the implementation of
51:32 SEO best practices right now I'm still getting people through the blog who are
51:38 looking for answers to those questions because they are searching them in Google and they are landing on my blog posts and then that turns into either a
51:44 customer or a client same thing with with YouTube because they're both search engines yeah yeah for sure for
51:52 sure um I have a whole rant on SEO can I do a
51:57 30- second rant on SEO go for it please yeah because people are all like oh I
52:05 want to do SEO and I want to learn all about it and do all the things and the thing about SEO that nobody talks about
52:10 is that Google knows what you had for breakfast so like you don't have to do
52:16 all these mackan naations to let Google know what you're about Google knows what
52:22 you're about Google reads your content Google has a clue the most important
52:27 thing is consistent content and inbound links now you also don't want to screw anything up so you don't want to have
52:33 you don't want to build your site on a crappy platform Squarespace Rock so that's fine you don't want to um you know have a bunch of huge images on your
52:40 site I know Caitlyn's not doing that you don't want to have like um no alt tags
52:45 and like crappy page titles and descriptions I know I know that Caitlyn's technical SEO is on point and
52:51 as web designers we need to know technical SEO we need to be able to do those things and execute them very well
52:58 but in terms of like long-term content ongoing content SEO strategy do we need
53:05 to like hack the whole I mean I would argue no you can I don't want to I don't want to like dis SEO experts at all
53:12 because it is 100% possible like hack all the stuff and create an article that just kills and if you have like a sales
53:19 page for a program that you're really pushing I mean doing some like SEO keyword and like competitor research and
53:24 stuff that's on point do it that's awesome but like I really I mean I have
53:29 just seen it over and over and over and over again for so many years that if you just create consistent content that
53:35 people link back to because they see value in it Google's going to be like oh she's smart she knows what she's talking
53:40 about and guess what she's talking about all these things and that just shoots your Authority score up and you get you
53:46 get traffic so anyway that's exactly what happened I had no clue what I was doing in relation to SEO at
53:54 all but because I was posting consistently and posting very long helpful articles
53:59 that answered all the questions related that could be possibly related to the main topic right it was it was golden it
54:06 worked yeah yeah and now you've got a stream now you've got that incoming stream of clients um for me um I'm probably
54:15 80% 80 to 90% of my um client base is referral driven referrals and repeat
54:21 business um I haven't done all of my financials for last year the first year that I was in business business my
54:26 average cost for a website was 2500 like 2800 or something like that um just
54:32 under three grand but the average client spent over 7,000 almost $7,000 with me
54:37 so the average client spent 6,800 um because of like what I was
54:43 talking about like upsells and cross selles and like good marketing and like exceptional customer service and like
54:49 making everybody feel really special and loved and valued and like all that stuff and so they would just keep like giving
54:55 me money and so repeat business is a really big part of my business model um and referrals is a is a big piece too so
55:03 so I would say that's like a big huge chunk of my business and then um and then the other is probably social I'm
55:08 pretty active in Facebook I'm pretty active in my groups I love my groups I have like maybe eight or nine groups I
55:15 really love and I go in there and I comment and I talk to people about either web design or hobes or whatever
55:21 and uh I've made a fair amount from that too that's probably my other one and I get some SEO traffic but that's not my main thing yeah I I I've never leaned
55:29 into the referrals thing and I all my clients love me but I don't push that I don't ask them to refer me I did a
55:37 couple of times and the people that I would that were referred to me one in
55:42 particular she met me on a discovery call this is not that long ago actually um she met me on a discovery call and
55:49 she had no idea what my business name was she didn't look at my website she just got the contact information must be
55:55 my like email address from my client and when she found out my business name was
56:02 launched the damn thing and then when she looked at my services page and it was so loud in her opinion she was like
56:10 I don't want my website to look like this and my first thought was you're not
56:15 my person that's yeah you're not yeah you're not my person yeah if that's a concern you're not my person and not
56:20 because that's the type of website that I build for everyone that's absolutely not the case I can build feminine and
56:27 pink just as easily as I can build distressed and like garbagey like right
56:32 whatever but it's up to the client is the fact that she didn't know me well enough to know that I could stand in as
56:38 her style and not mine yeah was like I'm this is not a conversation that I want to convince you on so uh it completely
56:47 depends on what you want I don't want referrals so that's not part of my
56:52 business I've always been better at just teaching people and building my authority that way and that's why they
56:58 come through yeah and there's something to that too I get a lot of clients who who are like they'll just it's just a
57:05 referral and and so they're they get on the phone and they're like what do you do where's your website what what are you how much is this but most of the
57:12 time I work really well with those clients I don't mind them at all because usually they're building I get a lot of Executives of seite people who are
57:20 opening Consulting gigs and so they just get a referral they don't care they're like I'm just going to give you my money just build me a good site I trust you
57:26 just do it and uh and they end up being good clients but they don't necessarily know anything about me or my aesthetic
57:32 or my site or whatever what's your email again like they just it's just not on their radar and if someone finds you on
57:38 Google they find you on Google they look on your site they look at you they look at your aesthetic they read your about
57:44 page they go through the whole process of what we build websites to do and so they come to the Discovery call knowing
57:49 you and knowing you a little bit better yeah for sure yeah that's so funny I love that okay next question
57:57 um how are we doing on time okay so we're right at time but we were think oh and Barb has question um and we were
58:04 thinking we would stay on a little bit longer because Caitlyn and I have time so we're gonna we're going to go to 90 minutes I think and if you have to go
58:10 that's fine submit your question in the chat we will totally answer but yeah we're like this is fun for us and we
58:15 might as well have the build up those watch hours on YouTube man so we're gonna keep we're going to keep going
58:21 okay so Barb says if launching a New Biz or website would you recommend having more than one blog post already written
58:26 yeah I would go to Five I would start with five if you can if you can only have if you only have three start with
58:32 what you've got but I would I would start with five and I would aim at Pillar posts so I would have one post
58:38 where you talk about your origin story and that in a way that emphasizes um your USP so unique seller
58:47 proposition thank you I was like how geeky do you guys want me to get with
58:53 this I'm sorry this may be more than you wanted know but you asked the question so I'm gonna get geeky okay go for it
59:00 okay um so you want to talk about your origin story but you want to talk about
59:05 um just jumped on a random live cool stuff yay we love it um yeah so you want
59:11 to start with um your origin story and you want to do it in a way that it underlines your USP so you want to talk
59:17 about like how you got started doing what you're doing in a way that shows
59:23 you can solve the main problem that you're Niche
59:28 has send me an email or reach out to me on socials if you want more about that because that's like a three-day Workshop
59:34 but there's like there's a whole thing so talk about your origin story in a way that solves a problem for your Niche um
59:41 then talk about your Niche do a whole post where you talk about your Niche who your right people are and and it doesn't
59:46 it doesn't have to be anything um like hidden or or or whatever you just
59:52 literally these are the people I serve you know um these are the people I like to work with these are the people who
59:58 find a ton of value in my work and just describe who they are their characteristics what do they want why do they want it why have they not been able
01:00:04 to get it um what are their thoughts what are their beliefs go into some of that on a post just talk about it um and
01:00:10 then do another post where you go into your USP specifically where you really talk about what you love about what you
01:00:16 do it's going to feel similar to your origin story but that's different where you go into your USP and USP is usually
01:00:22 grounded in what you love about what you do so if you have a hard time saying how do I set myself apart from my
01:00:27 competition look at the stuff you really enjoy and it's going to point you to why people should choose you and like then
01:00:33 who your niches and the whole thing um uh and then yeah and then I would link to if you're a web designer then I
01:00:40 would do a post that um talks about and that one like uh Megan from floating
01:00:45 Lotus design she just commented and she goes post that dried your money Pages yeah for sure um on your why uh the
01:00:53 about you thing I would link to your about page your about page needs to link to your services page um the story about
01:00:59 your Niche needs to link to your services page and the story about your USP needs to link to your contact page
01:01:07 yeah and I would just want to point out too because these are like Authority building expert building kind of
01:01:13 conversations you're starting with that always makes people a little nervous when we're like position yourself as an
01:01:19 expert you're like I'm not an expert okay the thing is you're you're not yes
01:01:28 you're right you're not an expert but you are an expert more so than your client that's all that matters all you
01:01:34 need to know is more than the person who's going to pay you to do the thing that's it so when we say position
01:01:40 yourself as an expert we're not talking about you got to be Oprah Winfrey you're not Robbins Mel Robbins you're not like
01:01:47 James wedmore you're not Marie foro you're just you you just know a little more than the people who don't know how
01:01:54 to do the thing and they aren't willing to do it themselves that's it yeah that's so true thank you yeah it's such a good point yeah you don't have to know
01:02:00 everything you just have to know be a couple points ahead of the person who you're helping yeah Barb says K KY
01:02:07 yay love it yeah so good okay so next question
01:02:12 um I'm good at oh fun I'm good at web design and
01:02:17 marketing and I've done a lot of it but always for other people and businesses and frankly the idea of having a website of my own of marketing myself is
01:02:23 terrifying to this introverted HS highly sensitive person I had my own business and website back in the day and I
01:02:29 discovered I really do not like having people stop me at the grocery store to ask hey aren't you so and so is there another way of doing things for an
01:02:35 introverted HSP who really values her privacy and prefers to stay out of the Limelight
01:02:41 yes um I'm probably not the best person to ask that particular question because
01:02:48 I am pretty introverted I'm probably more of an Ambert now but I was highly
01:02:53 introverted when I first started did not want to be the center of attention did not want my photo to be on the website
01:02:58 didn't even want to put my name in the business name didn't want my name on the about page or contact page didn't in my
01:03:03 email address like can I just be a studio and and you don't know who you're working with no that's actually not a
01:03:10 thing you can't do that so over the last 10 years I have grown
01:03:15 into the person who now has a YouTube channel it's surprises you where you go
01:03:21 is is my point so do the thing that's comfortable for you now or just this
01:03:27 side of comfortable ideally you're doing something that's slightly uncomfortable because that's how you grow um yeah I would just say don't box
01:03:36 yourself in quite so tight because you you do kind of kind of
01:03:42 put yourself out there I love that I love that and you went to um you went to squarespace's Circle day last September
01:03:49 and you were famous you had people come up to you and like know who you were that that was
01:03:57 rewarding but also strange like that's not a thing I didn't start this business
01:04:02 I didn't name it that I didn't put myself on all the YouTube thumbnails for that purpose so to see that as a result
01:04:10 of all the people that I've helped like that part's rewarding but also like you're here just to see
01:04:16 me that's so strange I love it but it's so strange that's awesome I love it do
01:04:23 you never know what's gonna come out of this right for sure um yeah I would I
01:04:29 would I would Echo a lot of that I would say you you need to position yourself as an authority if you want to do well you
01:04:34 need to be able to take up space in the world and um and position yourself as an expert
01:04:40 and authority and that that require some visibility I think you can do it in ways you don't have to have a YouTube channel
01:04:45 at all um at this point I I really recommend people if you're if you're
01:04:51 doing stuff online I recommend you do it on one of the four Evergreen channels which is YouTube blogging Tik Tok or
01:04:57 Pinterest you could do a ton on Pinterest and blogging and not ever show
01:05:02 your face um you know yeah right like you can you can do a ton with just
01:05:07 written medium you don't have to be on YouTube you don't have to be talking so I think there I mean there's a whole
01:05:13 trend of faceless marketing I even have a freebie on my side if anybody wants to go get it um there's a whole there's a
01:05:18 whole trend of faceless marketing and like um how to do that it's totally
01:05:23 possible so you don't have to have your face out online if you don't want to you just need to be willing to create
01:05:31 content yeah that's what I was doing when I first started I was way more comfortable writing about what I knew
01:05:37 rather than speaking about what I knew so you just really have to find the thing that gives you enough privacy but
01:05:44 also allows you to take up space in the world like you said yeah yeah okay so next question is really process oriented
01:05:50 I love it how do you keep clients on your timeline
01:05:55 that's that's such a loaded question um repeat yourself all the time all the
01:06:02 time all the time every time every point of contact I have with them I'm ending
01:06:07 that conversation by okay so you know what we're doing next this is the date this is what we're doing this is what I
01:06:13 need from you this is what you need from me like communicating constantly because
01:06:19 they're this is not their business we are leading them through a process they're unfamiliar with
01:06:26 yeah we are the leaders in the in the room for sure and the leaders in the process and I and I I really agree with
01:06:32 that if you if you have a deadline in mind that you are trying to adhere to that is every every communication ends
01:06:39 with that or if there's a specific thing you need from them that every um every email ends with this is what I need from
01:06:47 you and this is and by this date if if I'm driving it so the my business model in particular I don't care I I actually
01:06:53 don't care we should talk about your business model and why you keep them online because you build sites in two weeks yep yeah okay so that's a good
01:07:00 that's a fair question um I don't I don't like the I don't care approach just because I get
01:07:06 bored and want to move on from things no matter how much I love the project how much I love the client I want my brains
01:07:11 wandering off into creativity land and it wants to do 5,000 other things not because this thing is boring but because
01:07:19 my my brain just works that way I need to challenge myself and that challenge is over it's time to move on to the next
01:07:25 challenge so I have to do them in two weeks I found that Pages system really works well for my brain because of that
01:07:32 so two weeks for just a website three weeks for website and brand because of
01:07:38 that it's on a very rigid timeline so I from the get-go when I talk to them on
01:07:43 Discovery call I lay it out when they fill out their paperwork they get an automatic message that lays it out in a
01:07:49 table it's like this date we're doing this thing that date we're doing this thing that date we're doing this thing so it's cleared every return it's in the
01:07:56 contract it's in the invoice it's in the proposal it's in the thing that they get it's in all of the stuff it's in our
01:08:01 collaborative space in the client portal they have due dates when I talk to them we're repeating it it's literally at
01:08:07 every turn because of that though it sounds like a lot of work but it's not I promise because of that I don't have to
01:08:15 drive them like I am doing it and they are following I am leading and they are following it doesn't it doesn't feel
01:08:21 like I am pulling teeth to get this stuff done on time they just do what I'm asking them to do because
01:08:28 it's top of mind I'm reminding them constantly and I'm doing so in a way that doesn't feel like I'm nagging them
01:08:34 to death so yeah it works quite well like clockwork I never ever have a site that
01:08:42 goes past where that has been the timeline where that has been the
01:08:47 schedule I've had some that I've allowed to go past where like oh we got to add
01:08:52 on this extra thing it's all based on my timeline if I have projects coming up
01:08:57 after that and if I can typically though when I'm trying to stay booked out that's not a thing like about a week in
01:09:04 between this project and that project we're not moving like we can't finish it in your timeline in your spot you get
01:09:10 moved to the next available spot and so that's the secondary motivation for them to do it on time not just that I'm
01:09:16 asking them to or telling them to on a repeating basis but also they know their actual consequences outside of money
01:09:23 coming out of their wallet it's not just that it's also time lost so that's extra
01:09:28 motivation yeah I think that's a really good point too if I am trying to push someone along in in a process I give
01:09:36 them I'll give them three things I give them the this is what I need from you by this date and then the consequences and
01:09:42 if that doesn't happen this is what's going to happen um yeah so that's really and and I mean it's and we say
01:09:48 consequent I'm not yelling at them I'm just saying look you know if you don't do this this is how it's going to go
01:09:53 yeah yeah yeah yeah I mean they need to know this is not their job they don't they don't need
01:09:59 to know all of that stuff so they only need to know what happens if I don't and that's it you don't have to be nasty you
01:10:06 can just be like if this is if this launch date isn't good for you if you want to do it later if you have a photo
01:10:12 shoot or something and you want to put those client photos in later your portfolio whatever it is we can do it we
01:10:19 can totally do it I'll be there for you but it will not happen by this date yep exactly I love that yeah
01:10:27 awesome awesome um yeah and I for for me my process because I work totally
01:10:32 differently I do not do two week builds I tried it I can't make it work um it's too hardcore and I want to have freedom
01:10:40 of my day I don't want to know that I have to wake up and do your edits today or whatever I just want to be able I
01:10:45 want a little more fluidity in my day so the two-e build doesn't work for me um but the way I work my payment schedule
01:10:52 with clients is that I require payment upfront or in two payments one month apart so I don't care when we build your
01:10:59 site I don't care when it's finished I don't care about anything your second payment is due either when we launch so
01:11:05 if we launch sooner than a month but that almost never happens um but if we do launch sooner than a month uh then
01:11:11 you have to pay then or um one month later and the thing that that the reason I do it that way is because if a client
01:11:17 needs time or a client like you know has a thing or you know California gets lit
01:11:23 on fire or whatever I'm like don't don't sweat it like I don't care it's fine like you know we'll we'll just postpone
01:11:29 get back to me whenever you can now the kicker is when you do that because right
01:11:34 now I've set aside time now if if you don't want to do it right now I've got plenty of other stuff I can do it's fine but if you come back to me in three
01:11:41 months and say okay now I'm ready to finish my site there might be a queue so we're not going to work on your timeline
01:11:46 all of a sudden but um but yeah that's how I run mine yeah and I think that's totally fine as long as you're
01:11:52 communicating that with them and they know what the expectation is yeah for sure yeah that's the biggest key right
01:11:58 like always give your clients expectations creat such a sense of safety for them lowers their
01:12:04 anxiety and everything um okay so this was a question for me I'd love to know how you'd price web design with the
01:12:10 addition of AI Imaging and animation any thoughts on how to get a good estimate yeah so if I do um right I'm trying to
01:12:17 figure this out some clients I kind of throw in a little AI imagery depending on what they need and how prominent I
01:12:23 want to feature their site in my portfol to be perfectly Frank if you've let me build you a
01:12:29 really pretty site I might give you some goodies um but I'm working on a package
01:12:35 of like if I and of course I have my portrait my AI photo shoots on my on my side as a separate gig but if you want
01:12:41 me to design imagery for your site custom images for your site I'm flirting with maybe like 1500 bucks to do that
01:12:46 like custom imagery 1500 to 2,000 so that's kind of how I'm pricing that
01:12:52 right now that's good to know yeah you know uh when you speak to small business owners
01:12:58 oh how do you do that with images from clients do you do you Source images from
01:13:04 stock sites and stuff or do you require your clients to give you everything
01:13:10 um no I I don't require my clients to give
01:13:15 me everything but I do give them the opportunity to give them to give me what they have so um they have kind of a
01:13:22 bucket where they can dump stock photos if they have photos of themselves if they have any
01:13:28 specific photos that they want to show up on a contact page or an about page or Services page or whatever they can dump
01:13:33 that in there whatever I don't have I Source typically from unsplash for them
01:13:39 um and lately I have been periodically resubscribing to Mid journey to create
01:13:45 something that I can't find which has been useful so fun I'm not advertising
01:13:51 that because I don't want that's a rabbit hole I would love to go down but I don't have time for so right right
01:13:58 right so I am doing a little bit of that but I'm not charging for it at this at this point because I need to get a lot
01:14:04 better at it probably but very fun I love that that's exciting yeah I'm
01:14:11 always always happy to to convert another AI geek it's very okay so is Squarespace enough to
01:14:17 create a full big website and charge like 10K for a project yes yep for sure
01:14:25 so many times booking out has to do with knowing where to look for clients or
01:14:31 having a relationship with people who rely on websites if they don't have a relationships at the ready how are how
01:14:36 are you how would PE how would you advise people to find clients I feel like we maybe covered that
01:14:44 yeah anything you'd add no except that if they if they don't
01:14:53 have an if if they don't see the need for don't currently have a website you're it's going to be harder to
01:14:59 convince them that to buy one from you so if that's where the breakdown is
01:15:06 then I would not waste my time trying to convince people that don't have one to have one yeah if they
01:15:13 don't value a website you're not going to be yeah that's not a yeah it's yeah
01:15:19 not for not for the money that you need to charge in order to pay your bills like if we're talking 250 bucks for a
01:15:25 scor space website has five pages on it I mean yeah you're going to win that conversation yeah right but but if
01:15:31 you're charging 2,000 and up you're that's going to be a way harder conversation to have yeah yeah I agree
01:15:39 how much knowledge do you need of how much SEO do SEO knowledge you need before you start a web design
01:15:46 business well I would say you need to know nothing because that's approximately how much I knew when I
01:15:53 first started mine right I was just using the Squarespace checklist on in their help center that
01:16:00 was it that was what I knew about SEO that's a good checklist there's nothing wrong with that it's a good checklist
01:16:05 it's a good checklist I would say as a web designer you have to have technical SEO dialed in you've got to know that
01:16:12 you don't have to you know the on page and the off page and the ongoing SEO and all that stuff like you don't need a an
01:16:19 href you know subscription and like you don't need to be doing you know huge competitor research and stuff before
01:16:26 every you don't need to know all that stuff but you need to know in detail you need to know the ins and outs of page
01:16:33 titles descriptions how to do alt tags why to do alt tags how to compress images why that's important um that kind
01:16:39 of stuff did you do that kind of stuff back in 2000 th 2000s yeah yeah yeah
01:16:47 yeah yeah so back in that day so it was funny because in in those days um SEO
01:16:52 was different so SEO was all about knowing the tricks so like you know you
01:16:57 you we were just catching on to the fact that you could create a page that had the font of the same color as the
01:17:04 background so it would be invisible to the person landing on the site but you could stack that thing with keywords and
01:17:11 like you right and meta information was still a thing so um like one of the one
01:17:17 of the secrets I discovered so this other web design company that did sites for authors that she and I were always
01:17:23 trading for the top one and two POS I is one of the things that I would see on her sites when she would build a site
01:17:28 for somebody is she would have there were like 13 meta categories like author
01:17:34 and owner and business person and idea holder
01:17:39 there was just like all this stuff so in addition to titles and description which is all Google pays attention to now and
01:17:44 keywords there was a meta thing for keywords which actually hung around for a long time but that's long dead too at
01:17:50 this point but like there were all these meta lines of information you could put in and it was her name it was her
01:17:56 business it was her business address it was her business City it was her it was just like she just packed it with all of
01:18:02 her information and I'm like heck I can do that too so um so those were it was
01:18:07 in those days it was kind of knowing how to hack the system and that's the single biggest change that I've seen happen in
01:18:13 SEO now and it's why I preach what I do now of like you don't have to freak out about SEO anymore because it's not about
01:18:20 knowing the secrets it used to be it isn't now go it's just you just need to get out there and talk about what you
01:18:26 care about and what you do that's that's it and do it in a good way offer enough
01:18:31 value that people find Value in what you're doing and they link back to you I mean that's that's it that's it it's
01:18:38 it's really simple so anyway yeah so I would just say if you're talking about SEO from standpoint of you need your
01:18:45 website to get found um it'd be smart to learn best practices for your own website um if
01:18:52 you're talking about it in regard to clients um obviously the more you know
01:18:58 the better because if you give them a site with good underlying SEO Foundation they're going to get found a little bit
01:19:04 easier a lot easier potentially than if you don't um however I did not start
01:19:11 websites knowing any SEO did not know Squarespace had a checklist for this
01:19:18 so I thought checklist a good place to start yeah I shutter to know what those
01:19:24 first few websites were doing traffic-wise after I passed them off they were beautiful they were fun and
01:19:29 exciting they were interesting they were easy to use
01:19:35 but so do you have to how much knowledge do you need you can get started before you know anything but your product your
01:19:42 end product will be a lot more effective if you know a little bit yeah yeah yeah
01:19:49 for sure um and Fran Fran has a good question so the web portfolio should be
01:19:55 or should be screenshots I am a fan of screenshots so early on I did what
01:20:01 everybody said and I made all of mine live and I built some breathtakingly beautiful sites that I don't have
01:20:06 screenshots of and I wish I did because I wish I could show them off because they were really impressive um but the
01:20:14 the real reason is that when you link to live sites and then you hand your Mona Lisa cinee Chapel ceiling over
01:20:22 to the client they get at it with finger paint and screw it up and now you've got
01:20:29 this ugly thing with broken broken links and bad images and you know like they
01:20:35 and yeah they just clients will just do stuff so um screenshots screenshots screenshots screenshots I use links I
01:20:41 use live links in social media but that's it I tend to do a little bit of
01:20:47 both but only with the sites that I know like that's not a client that's going to go in there and Tinker
01:20:52 around so then I don't have to be worried so much about suddenly it being like beas and Butthead took
01:21:00 over you do a really smart thing because you actually put on this is the first place I've seen this and it was really
01:21:07 smart you put at the bottom maintained by client I mean it got to that point right
01:21:15 where I was like this is live this is still working it's still working for them it's a it's a real thing I didn't
01:21:22 fake it till I made it like right it go look at it somebody me for this but
01:21:29 also yeah I don't know what it looks like now right and it and it's smart
01:21:34 because then if if you're being paid to especially with like they buy a maintenance package or whatever um you
01:21:40 can say on their site maintenance by whatever and and you know site maintenance by me and and then it's and
01:21:46 you know the site is always going to look good and then you can use a link too yeah yeah yeah so screenshot in
01:21:52 those cases a screenshot of the homepage so you at Le know what it looked like before when you took the screenshot and
01:21:58 then linked to it and site client maintains the site or whatever yeah for sure depends yeah for sure I think
01:22:05 that's really smart yeah Case by case is probably the way to go um yes Alesa has an interesting question I I have seen
01:22:11 this all over the groups lately it's so bizarre um so I'm a screen gal too she says but do you have any preference on
01:22:17 whether you add designed by at the bottom of the site what has happened so somebody told the internet that it was
01:22:25 uh what did they what did I read petty petty or CH tacky that it was
01:22:31 tacky to put a site Credit in the footer that you built the site and they were like don't do
01:22:39 that this is my brain just just broke I was like f
01:22:49 that right no I get a ton of business from people clicking on those links you
01:22:55 can see in your analytics where your incoming traffic comes from not to mention that's a crap ton of in inbound
01:23:01 links that we were just talking about helps your SEO but like I get a ton of business from especially because I build
01:23:07 sites for influencers so they get lots of traffic and I get traffic from them
01:23:13 so there is no there is no world in which I would advocate for web designers
01:23:19 to not put a credit for their design skills in the footer now I know some
01:23:24 people talk about doing the design page if I'm doing a much bigger site and they
01:23:30 had like a photographer and you know the copywriter and like all that kind of stuff then I'll build the build build
01:23:37 the site Credit page um but that that's that site has got my name the link to my
01:23:43 business and everything on there yeah all of mine do too now I I do say that I'm not one of those Petty people like
01:23:49 if they want to take it off most likely in that situation
01:23:55 I don't need it to be there like they're if they're worried about it they're the type of person that I'm not going to
01:24:00 fight on that on that idea so I'm not going to charge them for it I don't care
01:24:06 that much but all my clients love me and it is absolutely in their f i that's
01:24:12 that's crazy talk what isn't that crazy yes B authors have the author name on it
01:24:19 yes right right and the publisher and the Ed thanked in the acknowledgements
01:24:26 what in what world like devaluing us yes and most client
01:24:34 and I feel like that too I feel like like clients are proud to show that off I mean this may sound
01:24:42 arrogant go for it but I feel like my clients are very proud that I built
01:24:48 their site I feel like they're very proud to show it off and be like hey you know like Diet like that chick she Built
01:24:55 My like she you go talk to her like it it reflects good on them that's why I
01:25:00 get referrals too it reflects well on them when they send people my way so like yes put your nameing on in there
01:25:07 you do it yes and mka goes yeah I feel like that that's how I might get similar
01:25:13 clients yes my Niche looks at each other's sites yes yes yes yes that's a thing that's a actual thing that's not
01:25:19 an assumed thing that's not like a hopeful wishful thinking that
01:25:25 happens right yeah for sure okay and Megan says I saw one person say they
01:25:30 didn't think it was appropriate to have a designer put their name on their site that they their name on their site that
01:25:35 they paid for right and then she's got the rolling eye emoji yes yes um and yeah Las is with Caitlyn yes
01:25:43 yes F that yeah that's no we're not no no each their own like if that's if
01:25:49 that's inappropriate for some people now there have been situations where I have amended the name in the foot in the side
01:25:57 credit because launch the damn thing doesn't exactly work for a Church
01:26:02 website for example like there is a niche misalignment there I have actually
01:26:08 changed it to just an abbreviation ltdt or something like that and still linked to it they can go down the rabbit hole
01:26:15 and figure it out but I don't have to proudly display my actual business name it's not about that it's about the link
01:26:21 right it's about the link designed by yeah very important abolutely yes 100%
01:26:27 um yeah Walt say proud yes that's why the buyin grows with more projects on products absolutely 100% 100% okay so
01:26:33 this is probably the last question we're gonna have um we're gonna have time for but this is the perfect one to end this
01:26:39 session on so okay I'd love to hear how you both came up with your business names and why you use uh your own
01:26:46 personal name or not so like yeah like how'd you come up with your business
01:26:52 name well the first one was was um I've changed I've changed it a lot I've
01:26:58 changed it three times since 2015 the first one was very
01:27:04 creative Caitlyn de designs excellent I know who would have
01:27:10 ever thought good for SEO that's not bad I mean you
01:27:16 know I I had it like that for about two years and then I was like that just
01:27:22 sounds at some point a decided it sounded very amateur so I was going to have to change it I needed a studio Vibe
01:27:28 so I workshopped a lot I literally like had a long list I mean an actual long
01:27:34 list like a legal pad list and uh I talked through it with a bunch of my
01:27:41 family no keyword research was done on this at all no strategic business e
01:27:49 marketing kind of like thought groups or market research was done I just picked something that sounded good that I liked
01:27:56 I went with Studio 1862 which uh was um something that
01:28:03 people remembered is the the number was always the thing like what is it again
01:28:09 1894 like yep I see that yeah so in high and sight maybe not the best option I
01:28:16 did that because we were in an Old Log Cabin at the time which the original portion of that in the side of the house
01:28:22 where my office was was built in 1862 so my studio was in was that was s of like
01:28:28 the established you know like not really but that was the vibe so um it was like Studio 54
01:28:37 plus old long cabin and then when that I realized when that didn't work um it was
01:28:43 because I felt too much like I was operating for uh corporate and then that
01:28:49 turned into I need to just find something that fits better and launch the damn thing and it's stuck it's been
01:28:57 that ever since once I love that and I love that it started as like a a name for a
01:29:02 template store because that makes so much sense I just you just launch the damn thing just do it yeah yeah just
01:29:09 launch stop thinking about it yes yes makes so much sense for your brand I love I love that so much it's so
01:29:16 awesome um okay so mine is a funny story so I so I was novel website design when
01:29:22 I was building sites for office and then I just stayed that for forever in a day I rebranded two or three times
01:29:29 um different things I ended up on a really grungy pink and gray website that I just fell in love with I like kept it
01:29:35 for years um but then anyway that's what I sold that's the business I sold in 2015 and then I just did Consulting
01:29:42 under my name I was just Dian wen.com for those years and then when I relaunched I didn't want to be Diane
01:29:49 wen.com because I'm like I just it's not what I saw when I was starting to do research again into what web designers
01:29:55 were doing I saw a lot of business names and I'm like I just I feel like I need a business name and one of the big things
01:30:01 I talk about rant about all the time is Clarity in my Consulting work and so I
01:30:07 was like let's see if Clarity website design is available and it was crazily
01:30:13 so I was like okay let's do that well then so I I was Clarity website design
01:30:18 for like a year and I made it pink and gold and you know there were these awful pictures of me like in this like studio
01:30:27 and it was terrible it was just it just looked generic and dated but it was just where I started I'm like this is good
01:30:33 enough to get going let's just get some clients and see if we even want to do this then I discovered
01:30:39 Ai and the brand went to hell because I decided that I fell I so
01:30:47 I really so my I went for this aesthetic so the month before I really got into AI I redesigned my whole site with this
01:30:53 pink and green like uh Atomic design mid-century modern thing and it was so
01:30:59 loud and obnoxious and fun and I loved it then I disc nobody else did but I did
01:31:04 me and Megan Kaitlyn loved it yes that's any designer loved it the lay people not
01:31:11 so much but then I discovered Ai and I realized that oh my God I don't have to
01:31:16 rely on these graphics and just images and colors anymore I can actually create like a me as a retro pinup 50s robot
01:31:24 loving Jetson's chick and I kind of lost my mind and if you want guys want to see
01:31:29 the site I'll actually show you the site I pulled it up I have a copy of it it's it's not the um how do I do this um it's
01:31:37 not the it's not the full-on site because like the animations and stuff don't work but you guys can get a feel for the vibe I love that Megan said
01:31:44 Space Cat rocked though oh my God I put a cat and a footer I don't know why like
01:31:49 it was just so I had a ball oops sorry sorry for the infinity sque oh and the quiz I had a quiz for a while let's get
01:31:56 rid of that okay so so here's the site now you got a picture too in the background there's a video of stars
01:32:02 flying by so much fun and then as you scroll
01:32:08 the little Atomic star like went down the page so it it followed and so you
01:32:13 know this like felt but this was this was my brand this is me oh my God oh my
01:32:18 God it's so much fun um and then like look like I'm still I know what I'm doing this is me speaking at work app a
01:32:24 bunch of years ago and you know in clients but look it's all pink and it's like f just look at the Spacey with this
01:32:32 Saturn pink bubblegum Saturn in the background I mean I had so much fun building the site it was just absolutely
01:32:37 ridiculous and there was so much movement and like all kinds of stuff on here but so anyway um uh the lesson here
01:32:45 was did you did you have clarity about your own
01:32:51 website I mean I was clear that I loved it but you know it it was funny I think
01:32:56 I was going through a place where I was really reclaiming what I loved about my business and I was really like I was
01:33:03 really enjoying design again I was really falling in love with my business after being so burnt out and so
01:33:08 traumatized it was really fun for me and I almost think I needed to do it but of course I built that monstrosity in sales
01:33:15 tanked like everybody was like and I had a bunch of people be like I referred you a bunch of clients but they landed on
01:33:21 your site and said yeah I don't think I Vibe with her style and I'm like oh crap
01:33:27 like I you know I just like I can't I can't I can't do that and so right about
01:33:32 that time Paige put out a video of all the trends of web design and I'm like
01:33:38 okay and by now of course I'm frustrated and I'm starting to get sweat money and I'm like what do I do and uh I went
01:33:43 through and I built a site where I just copied every single thing she put on that on that video just all of it and I
01:33:49 went into chat gbt and I'm like give me 10 names of a really fancy web design agency and number one was sway rise
01:33:56 creative and I was like yeah sway is like persuasiveness and Rise is like
01:34:02 growth and like yeah that's yeah that's awesome heck yeah that's me and um and
01:34:07 so yeah I put all that together and and I in like a weekend I did it I just in a fit of frustration and annoyance just
01:34:15 rebranded everything and renamed everything and everybody you know of course the the response was like wow
01:34:23 you're so fancy oh this looks so well love that new site and I'm just like I'm
01:34:28 Miss Space Cat but okay robot you got
01:34:34 and I I do think like the real lesson in that was you figuring out how to talk to
01:34:39 your ideal client the way that you had been doing that was not the conversation they were wanting to have right whereas
01:34:46 in my situation when I did that I was having fun with it I was for the first time being myself with launch the damn
01:34:52 thing and it attracted the people that I wanted to attract rather than repelling the people that I wanted to attract so
01:35:00 your messaging and your style I mean while it's not the end will be all it is kind of important it really is it's
01:35:07 you've got to pay some attention to it and it's it's it's really great to do what you love and and create the site
01:35:12 that you want and all of that but um at the end of the day you've got to give the people what they want what they're looking for what they expect so yeah it
01:35:20 has to work because it has to work yeah that's that's the thing if you just if I didn't need the money and I was just
01:35:26 building sites for other people who resonated with spacecat and robot girl like I would have had a blast that that business would rock but I would have a
01:35:33 lot of free time so just Lessons Learned yeah yeah but we
01:35:40 learned them and we shared them so that you don't have to learn that particular lesson yourself exactly exactly well
01:35:48 this was so much fun guys let us know uh what you thought of this format we love showing up live and just answering
01:35:54 questions and talking with you all this is just a blast and we have a lot of fun stuff coming up for the rest of the year we're going to do once a month for a
01:36:00 while and then we're considering going to twice a month if you guys want to see more of us uh so yeah thank you so much
01:36:06 to everyone who showed up live this was so much fun um even if you're here afterwards please leave comments let us
01:36:12 know if you have more questions uh we will certainly answer them in future episodes and thank you so much for being
01:36:17 here this was great and thank you Caitlyn for doing this with me I love this oh I'm happy to be here I'll do it all the time awesome awesome all right
01:36:25 thank you guys so much we'll see you next month bye
