Seven Ways to Save Time as a Web Designer
This year’s Circle Day showcased a full roster of accomplished designers, entrepreneurs, and creators who shared their expertise on how to power up your web design business. The event welcomed returning presenters Christy Price and Will Myers, who joined forces after finally meeting in person at Circle Day 2023. Christy is a web designer with more than 15 years of experience, while Will is a longtime developer and creator of Squarespace plugins. Together, they explore the world of entrepreneurship and web design on the Somewhat Useful podcast.
Christy and Will brought Somewhat Useful to the Circle Day stage for a special live episode. They started by asking attendees a simple but powerful question: ”how often do you feel overwhelmed in your business?” Then, they shared seven practices for mitigating this overwhelm.
1. Create a starter template
Building your own starter website templates is a great way to quickly spin up new websites that will match your client’s expected quality level from square one. Will observed how many Squarespace creators want to create starter templates to save time while maintaining quality, but neglect to do so because designing templates can take time and energy away from other core work tasks in the short term.
Christy began making starter templates following her Circle Day 2023 workshop about offboarding clients. Several attendees asked her to create starter templates for the pages she suggested for offboarding after projects. “I started thinking about what websites have in common, because in my mind, my clients were so different,” said Christy. “When it came to things like recurring spacing and custom CSS I was constantly redoing, I thought, oh, I could put all those in a starter template. Now, I’m saving time when kicking off projects by just duplicating a site from the starter template and building out the final site from there.”
2. Set up email marketing
Email Campaigns offer entrepreneurs an integrated, templated way to connect with audiences by building and sending compelling, brand-aligned emails and newsletters using existing content from their website. Will explained how when he wanted to use a new membership to actively communicate with subscribers, he began sending email campaigns for their speed, ease of use, and the way they seamlessly integrated with his existing workflow.
With Email Campaigns, clients can set regular or one-off emails containing exclusive content, sign-up discounts, looks ahead at future emails, and more that automatically send to new customers and subscribers captured through newsletter blocks, promotional pop-ups, and checkout opt-in fields.
Email Campaigns require no third-party software, offering everything from audience management and audience segmentation to in-depth customer journey analytics in one convenient solution. Best of all, Circle members get 20% off new annual Email Campaigns subscriptions, a rate you can extend to clients when signing up on their behalf. This is a massive upsell for anyone looking to diversify their income by converting new clients through expanded service offerings.
3. Leverage scheduling tools
Businesses and entrepreneurs use Acuity Scheduling to book virtual or in-person appointments, automate reminder emails and text messages, and collect payment from customers. Christy noted how her previous process for scheduling consultations with clients involved spending considerable time sending emails to—and awaiting replies from—the potential client, with no guarantee the lengthy exchange would result in a purchase of her services. That’s when she turned to Acuity Scheduling.
“Customers usually reach out via the contact form on my website, and in response, I use a template to craft them an email containing pricing, development timeline, and that contains the link to the Acuity appointment signup form that’s integrated with my Squarespace dashboard,” explained Christy. “This gating approach makes it so that people aren’t constantly booking calls with me.” She also uses Acuity Scheduling to schedule her private Squarespace help sessions, accessible only to people who prepay, so she isn’t inundated with session requests.
4. Control your inbox
As unread messages pile up, many people—web designers included—feel pressured to spend more time responding than completing other important tasks. Will recognized that he had to find a way to effectively manage the overwhelming emails in his inbox. “A couple years ago, all I was doing was answering emails,” he explained. “As business people, we want to be really responsive to our clients, but there came a point where I was so focused on emails that I wasn’t really able to push my business forward.”
To curb these distractions and regain control over the day, Will recommends deactivating your personal message notifications across all your devices. Specify times during the week for responding to business-related messages, and delegate certain email types, like customer service-related inquiries, to relevant teammates whenever possible.
Pro tip: Creatives can minimize communication time and reclaim the workday by specifying hours during the week that clients and colleagues can expect email and chat responses.
5. Craft audience-tailored content
Before they officially became collaborators, Christy and Will would spend a lot of time in the Circle Forum investigating design- and business-related questions from other Circle members. If they already knew or could find the answer to a question, they'd create content answering it on their website or blog, then link that content in their forum response.
Christy and Will call this process “sneaky marketing,” as it can bring new visitors to a brand’s website to engage with conversion-driving site content and sign up for recurring content (i.e., newsletters). This helps sustain long-term brand affinity. It’s also proof that robust content creation doesn’t require reinventing the content wheel, but can be made better by invoking a content flywheel—that is, using already strong existing content to craft impactful new content.
Discover insights on creating a self-sustaining content flywheel.
6. Make and use short URL mappings
The internet runs on URLs. They take audiences to the content they’re looking for and empower businesses to direct prospects and existing customers to advertised content, products, and services. Will recommends using URL mappings to point consumer-friendly links to specific content. Use shorter, more memorable links when it’s not possible to hyperlink text, such as in Instagram posts or when spoken aloud during a podcast. These URLs should be less time-consuming to enter, thus more enticing to your audience.
Website content changes over time. This elicits the need to change wherever old links bring site visitors so their journeys don’t end when they reach a no-longer-valid page. URL mappings can help you and your clients solve this challenge, too. “I have a client who’s an author and needed to put a QR code in the back of their book, but they didn’t know where it would end up,” Will recalled. “With URL mappings, I can just redirect that QR code’s link to anywhere on the internet so the author gets constant control over it.”
URL mappings can even help designers and creative entrepreneurs that market using affiliate links. For instance, if an affiliate program changes but you are using a shortlink, you won’t have to manually track down and change all affiliate link instances across the web to continue getting paid. “You can update it on the backend and it’s seamless for everybody else,” added Christy.
7. Enact and follow productivity-boosting systems
At the end of the day, no matter your level of organization and work ethic, there’s only so much you can accomplish on your own in a workday. Will and Christy urge adding rigid productivity systems into your workflows can be a major benefit, both for saving time and for ensuring no tasks fall through the cracks. For example, Christy uses checklists to track and perform the routine tasks in her design workflow, like remembering to set social sharing images.
Saving time as a web designer
Ultimately, these types of systems help amplify the creativity that fuels designers and developers like Christy and Will as they navigate their daily work and even personal lives. “I’ve hesitated to build systems into my business because they can make it feel like you’re removing creativity from your work,” said Will. “But actually, systems allow space for the creativity.”
Want more?
Check out Squarespace Circle, Squarespace’s program for professional designers. Along with exclusive content, discounts, and other perks, Circle brings professionals together from across the globe to exchange advice while connecting with new clients and collaborators.
