Squarespace Designer Katy Carlisle
Meet Katy
The IPSE community is full of brilliant individuals building their self-employed careers and businesses. In our series of Member Story interviews, we share their knowledge, advice and experiences to help and inspire others.
Approaching the tenth anniversary of working for herself, Katy Carlisle has focused on a specific niche by offering web design, training and even creating a community based around the Squarespace website system.
Can you introduce yourself and your business?
I’m Katy Carlisle. My business is called Squarespace Queen. And I do Squarespace web design and training.
About 50% of my business is web design for clients. And then the other half is training people how to use Squarespace to build their own websites. So, Squarespace, if you don’t know it already, if you’ve never listened to a podcast that’s been sponsored by Squarespace, or a YouTube video, it’s a website building tool.
And it’s really easy to use. It’s designed for people who don’t have any coding background, but it’s also really flexible for experts like myself to customise, so that you can create a really unique site for different people.
So, I work mainly with clients in the charity and non-profit industry, as well as other freelancers, and very, very small businesses.
And then for my training side, I do one-to-one training via Zoom, I do group workshops, and I’m just working on some online courses as well. And I also have a little community called Squarespace Club where people can ask questions, and I share updates about what’s going on with the platform as well.
Given your support for the platform, have you become more involved with Squarespace itself?
They do have a few schemes. I’m a Squarespace authorised trainer, and I was actually approached to be in the first cohort of the programme that they were piloting. Because, yeah, I’ve been pretty evangelical about it.
There’s also a community for people who are Squarespace developers, called Squarespace Circle. And I’m one of the community forum leaders as well. So, there’s certain things where, because of my long-term involvement and my enthusiasm, I’m quite involved with some of the different programmes that they have.
How long have you been an IPSE member?
I think I first joined IPSE in either late 2014 or early 2015. It was not that long after I started freelancing. I had previously been a member of another industry association that supported businesses, and I just didn’t feel like they really understood the role of a creative freelancer like myself.
I think we were probably a bit of a rare breed back then compared to how we are right now. But that sort of lifestyle freelancer, not wanting to grow, not wanting to set up a limited company. I didn’t need printer cartridges and office space. So, after my first year with that organisation, I discovered IPSE. And I thought that’s perfect, there’s an association that’s dedicated to freelancers, to people like me. It seemed like IPSE really understood what my needs were, and what I was looking for.
