81: From PhD to CSS: Web Designer Career Advice from Christy Price
Thinking about becoming a Squarespace designer but not sure where to start? In this inspiring interview, 20-year web design veteran Christy Price shares her journey from cognitive psychology PhD student to successful Squarespace expert, offering invaluable insights for aspiring designers.
Finding Your Path in Web Design
Sometimes the best career advice comes from unexpected places - like a random conversation on a ski lift in Telluride. For Christy Price, that chance encounter led her to leave her PhD program and dive into the world of web development, where she discovered her passion for bridging the gap between coders and designers.
"I was one of the few people that could actually talk to the coders and the designers and make them understand each other," Christy shares. "I started basically being a translator for those two teams and realized that I loved what the designers were doing."
The Evolution to Squarespace
After years of working with platforms like WordPress, Christy made a strategic decision in 2018 to focus exclusively on Squarespace. Her reason? It perfectly aligned with her vision for both her business and her clients' success:
Clean, maintainable websites that clients can manage themselves
No ongoing maintenance plans required
Built-in CSS capabilities that make customization intuitive
User-friendly interface that prevents "dumpster fire" scenarios
Setting Yourself Up for Success
For those looking to start their Squarespace design career, Christy emphasizes the importance of:
Clear Client Communication
Set expectations from the first discovery call
Document your process clearly in proposals
Send weekly progress updates
Define clear boundaries for revisions
Professional Development
Study successful Squarespace websites
Practice reverse engineering designs you admire
Build your toolkit of solutions
Stay curious and keep learning
Work-Life Balance
Set reasonable work hours
Remember that "done is better than perfect"
Create boundaries that support your ideal lifestyle
Be a good boss to yourself
Pro Tips for Client Management
Christy's experience has led her to develop several effective strategies:
Live Revision Calls: Schedule three live calls during each build to make quick adjustments and educate clients
Feedback Framework: Guide clients to express needs in terms of goals rather than specific pixel measurements
Clear Boundaries: Define revision rounds upfront and set clear expectations for additional work
Regular Communication: Keep clients informed with weekly updates and clear next steps
My Favorite Quote from Christy Price
Ready to begin your journey as a Squarespace designer? Christy's top advice from the episode: "Start reverse engineering other websites. Find Squarespace websites that you love and start figuring out how people build them... When you see something on a Squarespace website, you're like, that looks amazing. How do I do that? Figure it out."
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Becca: [00:00:00] You know that phrase, never meet your heroes? Well, I am very glad that I did not take that advice. Hanging out with Christy Price in real life has been an awesome experience, and I'm so excited to have her here on this episode of Think Inside the Square. Christy Price is one of the original Squarespace designers that convinced me to choose this platform because she's created an amazing career around her unique designs and the way that she teaches our community.
I am honored to have her here and cannot wait to introduce you to one of my favorite Squarespace ers. Now be advised, the term Squarespace is a trademark of Squarespace Incorporated. This content is not affiliated with Squarespace Incorporated. Without further ado, Christy, welcome to Think Inside the Square!
I'm so excited to have you here. For the few listeners of mine who have not met you yet, can you introduce yourself for us?
Christy, welcome to Think Inside the Square. I am so excited to have you here. For the few listeners of mine who have not met you yet, can you introduce yourself for us?
Christy: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Christy [00:01:00] Price. I'm a Squarespace expert and educator, and I've been doing web design for goodness over 20 years now, and in 2018 moved my business to focus solely on Squarespace, haven't looked back.
Uh, I live in Austin, Texas with my husband and two Labrador Retrievers, and you can find me online at christyprice. com.
Becca: 20 years in this fast paced world of web design. I can't even imagine what it must have been like when you got started. Fill us in. What was it like designing a website 20 years ago?
Christy: Things have changed incredibly, so when I started, the way we designed websites was we'd open up Adobe Photoshop.
Make a page, a website page, in Adobe Photoshop. And then there was a slicer tool we would use that would turn elements of the image into table cells. So we would basically code a giant table of rows and columns and stick parts of the image in it.
Becca: Oh my gosh, are you [00:02:00] getting like, to get flashbacks, been working in Classic Editor to building that way?
Christy: That's a great question. Uh, yeah. And the other thing that has changed is we didn't have cascading style sheets back in the day either. So we would actually do all the styles in line in our HTML. So that has made life way easier.
Becca: The introduction of CSS must have been monumental, such a game changer. Now I'll be honest with you, Christy, that was one of the first things that brought me into this field of web design, the creativity and the flexibility that custom code gave to my designs. So I'm really curious, with it being so complicated back from the slicing Photoshop days, I want you to share your journey with us, your journey into website design.
What drew you into this field?
Christy: Yeah, so at the time I was in graduate school, so I was working on my doctorate in cognitive psychology and I had this epiphany on a ski lift in Telluride.
I was [00:03:00] riding the ski lift with an attorney who had quit his job and moved to Telluride to just be a ski instructor and I was listening to his story and realized I don't think I want to be a professor. I think I want to do something else, but I don't know what that something else is. And so we were talking and he was like, well, what do you like to do?
And I said, well, I, I like coding. I code a lot for my research and I like doing that and he was like, well, you should just do that. Like you'll make way more money doing that than as a professor. And if you don't want to be a professor, why would you do that? So thanks to this random dude on a ski lift and tell you, right, I got back to grad school.
I asked my, um, advisor for a semester sabbatical, he said no, and I said fine, I quit, uh, and then I left, and a friend of mine reached out like the same day and said, hey, I'm working for an internet startup company, and we need coders, I know you like to [00:04:00] code, come join us, so I showed up at mall. com, and And I did coding and it turns out, I was one of the few people that could actually talk to the coders and the designers and make them understand each other.
So I started basically being a translator for those two teams and realized that I loved what the designers were doing that, that even looked more fun than coding to me. So I learned everything I could from them. I was like a sponge. And then I hopped around to a few different startups in Austin and then the internet bubble burst.
We all got laid off, and I started freelancing. So I've been freelancing for years and years. Worked part time while my daughter was growing up. And in 2018, I'm like, I want to do this full time. I want to work for myself. I want to start getting processes in place to make this sustainable. And that's Squarespace.
Becca: [00:05:00] Christy, that is an amazing origin story. Thank you, Random Dude on a Ski Lift, love it. And I think it's really great that you paid attention to what you were working on in your life and in your career. You focused on where you were drawn.
You were excited about working with the code and then that drew you to the design and you focused on absorbing all you could from all these different aspects of internet based industry until you found the niche that felt right. And then you actively pursued, okay, this is what I want to do full time.
You didn't wait for those things to fall into your lap. You found a way to make sure that that was exactly where you needed to be. And I really admire that approach to creating your own career. I think that's really exciting.
Christy: Thank you. Yeah, I think for me, I grew up around folks who. Didn't necessarily love their job.
So my dad was a mechanic at DuPont. Like that was his job. But what he loved was farming. So we had a farm. He made no money on the farm, but he loved it so much. And [00:06:00] he had this mechanic job to pay the bills. And so I saw that and I thought, I, I don't want to end up where I'm not being able to pay the bills, doing what I love.
I need to figure out what that is. And so I think that was one of the reasons that, you know, I knew something was out there for me. I just wasn't sure what it was.
Becca: Yeah, that's really interesting. And I'm kind of curious with. Your career development and how you stumbled into this magical world of web design and you knew that that was exactly where you needed to focus.
Tell me about the transition from going from your photoshop days all the way to square space. What was it like when you discovered the square space platform and were there any others along the way that you thought were going to be your sole focus before you realize square space was it?
Christy: Yes. So That year, 2018, actually starting the year before, I'm like, next year, I'm going to go full time.
This is going to be, you know, 40 plus hours a week. I'm going to have an expectation for an income that I'm going to try and meet. [00:07:00] So starting in 2017, I started looking at website builders because between, somewhere between those days where I was Coding things by hand from Photoshop, uh, to 2017, I had moved to working in WordPress.
So I worked in WordPress for years, and I hated it. My clients hated it. They didn't want to do any updates. I didn't want to do their updates. I didn't want to go in and fix plug ins every month. They didn't want to pay me to fix plug ins every month. It was pretty miserable, but that's what everybody was doing.
Like, that's all I knew. And in 2017, I realized, like, I'm not happy with this. My clients aren't happy with this. I have to find something that I enjoy that's sustainable for both me and my clients. And I knew for me, I didn't want to offer a maintenance plan. I wanted to be able to, like, on a whim, you know, pick up my backpack and go to Europe if I wanted to.
I decided [00:08:00] that I wanted to find a platform where my clients could do most of the maintenance themselves. And that didn't require any maintenance aside from when they wanted to make changes to their website. So, I built a website in 2017 and early 2018, I built a website in every website builder I could find.
Weebly, Wix, Strikingly, like everything that was out there at the time, I built a website in it. I actually have two Wix websites still live today from that little foray into, you know, other platforms. But I found Squarespace. And it worked the way my brain worked. So, I mentioned CSS. And so it has that special CSS panel where it holds all of your custom code.
And it has page injections and site injections for code. And, you know, my background was code. So I loved how that was set up. It made sense to me. And at the time with Classic Builder, you could hand off a website to your client with very little instruction. [00:09:00] And there was It was really hard for them to turn it into a dumpster fire, like no matter what they did, it still looked pretty good.
So when I found Squarespace, I was like, Oh, this is it. I'm going all in.
Becca: All of those reasons resonate with me so much, Christy, and why I focus on Squarespace too, and you hit on one that is so important, we've got to repeat it, the handoff. The handoff is such an important aspect of the web designer client relationship, and I also appreciate that you recognized monthly maintenance might be a standard thing for a lot of website designers, but in this world that you're creating, in this dream career of yours.
You recognize that that wasn't something that would be sustainable for the career that you wanted to create, for the type of client you wanted to support. You want to empower them to be able to take their website and use it themselves, to manage those updates, make those new blog posts. And Squarespace was the answer for that.
I think clearly identifying the career path you want for yourself was such an instrumental part of setting [00:10:00] this up for your own success, and that two decades later, you're still happy being a Squarespace designer. I think that's absolutely wonderful.
Christy: As freelancers, we are our own boss, and why not be a good one? Like, give yourself projects you like to do. Give yourself boundaries, like, I'm not going to look at my phone after 7pm for work.
I'm not going to check my email on weekends. You can do that. And a lot of that goes back to actually my first boss in the web development world. His name was Matt at mall. com. I will never forget. I was working on one of these websites. Uh, for mall. com and it was in Adobe Photoshop and I'm like, it just need, I kept working on it, working on it.
He came by and he was like, that's great. Go home. And I was like, Matt, I've still got, he was like, no, 80%. You're good. Get out of here. And I was like, what do you mean? He's like, yeah, give it 80%. Like that's going to be so much better than anybody else's a hundred percent. Like you're, you're good. Go [00:11:00] home. And so.
I don't want to say that I give client work 80%. I do give it my all, but I do realize that done is better than perfect and that you can spend days and years tweaking things and that little those tweaks are imperceptible to anybody but you. So the things that I've learned are there is a stopping point where you can launch things into the world and you get to be a boss to yourself.
That's good.
Becca: I think that is such fantastic advice and I love it. I feel like a lot of us with the, uh, the code mentality and mindset, we get very, very specific and we put so much pressure on ourselves to make things literally pixel perfect. We are definitely so much harder on ourselves and working on these projects and giving yourself a little bit of grace can be an absolutely invaluable asset to your own career. I think that's wonderful. Now I'm curious, what kind of advice would you offer to someone who's starting their career as a website designer and they're not sure how to [00:12:00] set those expectations with clients from the outset?
Christy: That is an excellent question. And I have been there. So before I had good processes and systems, I remember when I was working on WordPress, I was working with an architect on her website and She just could not decide on the color blue for the background of her website and we looked at that blue for two weeks.
I must have changed it a hundred times. And at some point, I feel like she asked her sister's cat what the cat thought. It became ridiculous. And I'm like, nobody cares. It's going to look different on different monitors. Nobody cares. It's just a light blue. Nobody cares what hex code we're using.
After that, I'm like, boy, I need to put some boundaries in place. So, you know, over the years I've had experiences like that and coming out of them whenever something is hard, there's friction, something is painful for me or the client, I try to do something to fix it. So after that client, I started looking at [00:13:00] How clients could provide feedback and how I could do revisions and my process today is different than it was in the past.
Christy: Today I offer live revisions calls and we get three life calls during a build and I will do revisions and that's great because my clients want to learn how to use the platform and I can quickly show them why something is a bad idea. I try to ask for feedback along the lines of Instead of, can you make the logo twice as big?
Maybe say something like, I feel like our brand isn't standing out enough. What can we do to, to address that? Because, as a web designer, we're not a pixel pusher. Some, a client may come in and they want to be the art director, but they're not a web designer. They don't understand all of the work that's gone into learning how to build a website that's effective.
So, if I'm doing it live, I can educate them as I go. Now, five, six years ago, I would not have felt comfortable doing live revisions calls with clients. So, I put boundaries around [00:14:00] rounds of feedback. They got two rounds of feedback and revisions for each project. And give me a bullet pointed list of what you need.
Addressed and we'll do that. And then we'll do one more before launch. And if you need more than that, you can hire me hourly. And another thing that I've done to really help solidify those boundaries is to communicate them from the outset. So on the discovery call, I'm really clear how my process works.
When I send the proposal, again, really clear how the process works, what they get, and then I remind them. We have a strategy call. I remind them about their, the process, what they're getting, when they need to provide things. And throughout the project, I'm sending weekly email reminders every week. Here's how things are going.
Here's what's next. Here's what to expect. So I want to make it as easy as possible for my clients and just make them have a great experience so they'll recommend me to someone else.
Becca: Clarity is so crucial at every step in [00:15:00] the process. And you hit on something that I think is really important is that a lot of people want to hire a website designer to make this a reality.
But they assume that because they've used a website before, they will know exactly what they want. And sometimes it takes our experience as website designers to say, okay, this is actually the way that would be better for your users.
This is accessible. This is achievable. This is obtainable. This is a kind of design that translates your vision to life. And it might not always match what they want, but that's where we as website designers can bring our experience to the table.
Christy: I think one of the challenges for most people who aren't web designers is they think of a website like it lives on a piece of paper. And it doesn't. It changes based on if you're looking on your phone or a laptop or a desktop. And as web designers, we're taking all of that into account as we build the website.
When they're looking at it and they're like, Oh, this is wrapping like this. And then you show them a different screen size and they're like, Oh, it doesn't wrap like that. There it's always a surprise. So [00:16:00] I think doing some of that education up front about. Responsive design and just showing them your expertise from the get go really helps kind of tamp down that like, I want to be in charge of something else that you said or might've been like, what am I red flags of working with someone is when they come and they're like, I know exactly what I want the website to look like.
And I'm like, Oh no,
Becca: Oh, no is right. I completely agree with that as a big red flag. You know, it's interesting that as website designers, we think our job is just to translate someone's vision into a beautiful, responsive design. But there is another factor that is just as important, and that is making sure our clients are set up to work with us.
Helping them understand what they can expect from every stage of the process is so important. Not just what the end result will be, what these deliverables will be. But what it's like to actually work with me to make sure they're set up for success and that they understand what the end of the project is [00:17:00] actually going to be like.
Now, you gave one of my favorite Squarespace Circle Talks. I can't remember if it was at Circle Day or if it was online, but you talked about off boarding clients and helping them step away. It really highlights the importance of setting those clear expectations in the very beginning. That level of advice that you provided was so helpful and such a unique perspective. Now, I'm really curious, that was a few years ago, and I don't want to bug you too much, but I'm curious, Christy, do you have more education like that available for our community?
Christy: The talk that you mentioned was Circle Day 2023, and it was called, It's Not Hard to Say Goodbye. Crafting Client Offboarding. And after that talk, I got so many questions about a couple of the things that I mentioned. And people were asking, Do you have templates for this? Can you explain how this process works a little more? People were so craving. Process and so since then I've had in the back of my mind [00:18:00] an idea for a course and it's going to be launching in February of 2025 at the end of the month and it's called the web designers playbook and it is all of my systems, all of my processes for running a website build project.
So you get all the email swipe files that I'm sharing with clients. Everything that I talk about on the Discovery Call to everything at Client Offboarding. So, if you know how to build a website, but you're feeling like your process is a bit of a mess, or you feel like you could be making it easier for yourself and your clients, then I think this would be a good course.
Becca: I think that sounds awesome, that sounds like something I wish I had when I first started designing websites. That's definitely the communication part that a lot of us are missing, is how to properly communicate with our clients, educate them on what the process is like, but also set their expectations up in the right way so that they get excited about what you're about to share, and the letting go.
I will be honest with you, from back in my website designer days, [00:19:00] The client off boarding was one of the hardest parts of the process. The very first website I ever built was a 300 Wix website. And this was my first actual client, not building for a friend or helping someone out with their site.
Brand new first client. And for three years, she emailed me with random questions, trying to track down an image that she had uploaded to her website before I even started working on it. And it was just the absolute worst. I think off boarding is so crucial and I'm glad that's part of something that you're teaching.
Christy: Well, she got her money's worth.
Becca: Her money's worth and then some for sure. All right, Christy, I've got to put you on the spot here. Now, you've always been so fantastically transparent about your business and about your process and designs in general. And I know this course is going to be amazing. I'm very excited about this playbook.
But for those folks that are listening to this episode that are considering a career as a Squarespace website designer, maybe they've dabbled, but they're not quite ready to take the [00:20:00] leap do you have any one liners for us?
The number one piece of advice that you want to share with them. What's your top advice for an aspiring Squarespace designer?
Christy: My top advice is to start reverse engineering other websites. So find Squarespace websites that you love and start figuring out how people build them. And I, that was how I got started with Squarespace. And that was really an eye opener into what you can do with a platform.
When you see something on a Squarespace website, you're like, that looks amazing. How do I do that? Figure it out. And pretty soon you'll have an amazing toolkit to work with. Absolutely. I love it. Figure it out. That is definitely one of our mottos, right? Our underground mottos of the Squarespace community is, Huh, I can probably do that.
Let's figure it out.
Yeah, if I can do it, you can do it too.
I love it. Thank you so much for joining us today, Christy. I'll include links in the show notes to your website and to your fantastic new web designers playbook. I'm really excited to see people harness the power of the education you're about to provide them to [00:21:00] just propel their careers to new places.
That's going to be really awesome. Thank you so much for being here today, Christy. Thanks so much, Becca. It's always a pleasure talking with you.
Becca: And thank you, dear listener, for tuning in to this episode of Think Inside the Square. I truly hope you enjoyed my chat with Christy Price. You'll find links to everything we talked about in the show notes available at insidethesquare. co forward slash podcast. Thanks again for tuning in and most importantly, have fun with your website.
Bye for now.
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📖 Christy’s Website Designers Playbook™: learn.christyprice.com/playbook
📚 Christy's Courses: learn.christyprice.com
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🎧 Past episodes: insidethesquare.co/podcast
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