Do You Need to Learn to Code to Be a Web Designer?
I love a good accidental pivot story — and Kacey's might be one of my favourites.
They came up through restaurants, spent years as a sommelier in the New York City area, and then lockdown hit — fifteen minutes after they'd moved, as Kacey puts it — and everything changed. Bookkeeping turned into virtual assisting, virtual assisting kept leading to Squarespace, and a slow, stubborn snowball of courses and curiosity eventually turned into a full-stack development business. Not because of a sweeping dramatic career change. Just one small directional shift after another.
What I find so compelling about Kacey's story isn't just the trajectory — it's the offer they landed on. Kacey doesn't build websites for end clients the way most designers do. They build for other designers — stepping in at the end of a project to take a fully approved Figma mockup and bring it to life in Squarespace with custom CSS and JavaScript. And the demand? It found them before they even knew they had an offer. By the time we sat down to talk, they'd been running their dev business for just over a year and had already received 12 unsolicited Shopify enquiries in a single two-month stretch.
We talked about how they learned to code, how they price their work, how they find clients without really trying, and what it actually feels like to go from a bustling restaurant floor to a quiet desk and a blank code editor.
Prefer to watch? Catch the full conversation below, or keep reading.
From restaurants to restaurants' websites — the long, winding path
Kacey is what they cheerfully describe as a "pandemic-induced designer-developer." Before 2020, their entire career had been in hospitality — restaurants, wine, the floor. They'd recently moved to the New York City area and were pivoting into sommelier work when lockdown arrived. Restaurants in NYC closed fast.
What followed was a classic cascade. Bookkeeping first — then virtual assisting, because that's where the work was. And then, almost without fail, every single client they took on ended up needing something done to their website. One of those clients was a Squarespace designer who'd bring Kacey in to check links, sit in on the process, get a feel for the platform. She suggested a couple of courses. Kacey took them. One thing led to another.
"It's always just been this slow snowball effect," Kacey told me. "One suggestion leads me there, leads me there, leads me there."
By late 2023 they were firmly in designer territory — and then a teacher in a marketing class looked at them sideways and said: did you say you do development? You should just do development. Another small pivot. And from that point forward, development was essentially all Kacey did.
The trait that runs through this whole story is the willingness to follow the path rather than think themselves out of it. So many people get to the edge of a new direction and then spend six months convincing themselves it won't work. Kacey just kept taking the next step. A little delusional, as they put it. Necessarily so.
Learning to code: stubborn, front-loaded, and worth it
Here's the honest thing about going the development route: it's slower to get started. Kacey is the first to say that other designers who began their businesses around the same time have probably outpaced them in raw income or client volume — because development requires actually learning to program, and that takes time before it pays off.
Their process was completely self-directed. They'd be working on a client site, get inspired by a design they had in their head, and realise they couldn't build it with Squarespace's native tools alone. So they'd Google it. Take a course. Find the CSS that unlocked what they needed. Then that would snowball into genuinely enjoying the code — the manual quality of writing it out in Squarespace, thinking through the logic, building something precise.
"I just was stubborn and I kept after it," Kacey said, "because it did not make sense for a really long time. And once it started making sense I was excited about it."
The key insight they kept returning to: learn the platform before you touch the code. Squarespace is a genuinely powerful tool, and nine times out of ten, what designers come to Kacey for — the spacing, alignment, responsiveness, heading hierarchy, type systems — can only be understood properly if you already know what Squarespace does natively. Code is a layer on top of that foundation, not a replacement for it.
Kacey took Square Secrets and Square Secrets Business first, and their advice for anyone weighing the same path is clear: start there. Figure out what clients actually want — which is mostly good construction, not spinning animations — and then decide whether you want to go deeper into CSS and JavaScript. You might not need to. Kacey loves it, but they're honest that the love for it is a personal thing, not a prerequisite for running a profitable design business.
The offer that found them: flat-rate dev sessions for other designers
Kacey's clients are not small businesses or personal brands looking for their first website. Their clients are Squarespace web designers — people who design beautifully but either can't or don't want to handle the custom coding side. Kacey comes in at the end, takes the fully approved mockup, and builds it.
The offer is called a dev session — a two-week sprint. Week one is the build; week two is support, revisions, transferring ownership, connecting the domain, submitting to Google Search Console, adding the favicon, building out the terms and conditions page. Everything. By the end of it, the site is finished.
The pricing is flat-rate: $3,750 for a standard dev session, scoped to roughly five pages of custom coding built in a week. Extended scope — bigger sites, more advanced code, more complex budgets — gets priced separately, and can include ongoing support for clients who need a hand for the first couple of months after launch.
Kacey also offers a dev day (a daily rate for shorter or one-off projects) and hourly office hours, where a designer can book them for a single hour to tackle something specific — a spacing fix, a bit of code, a feature their client spotted somewhere and wants implemented. Those office hours are, by Kacey's account, a delight. "We'll do anything from fixing spacing with like coding where I'm literally like padding left two pixels on this box… and we're doing it together."
The flat-rate model was a deliberate choice. Other developers often work hourly and stack projects. Kacey doesn't. When they're building your site that week, that's their only job that week — they put on music, get into it, and work until it's done. No hourly overruns, no waiting on approvals to extend the budget, no ghosting. The whole thing is front-loaded: everything — mockups, assets, copy, photos — is finalised before Kacey touches a line of code. Because of that, the two-week window doesn't feel rushed. It just feels organised.
"As soon as you book me, we know when I start, we know when we finish, and when it's a flat rate, I just work until it's done."
Who's actually booking them — and the kinds of sites they build
The range is genuinely wild. A crochet artist. A stud farm in England. Dentists, doctors, dermatologists. Personal brand sites for the designers themselves. The connecting thread isn't the industry — it's the designer. Kacey's clients are Squarespace web designers who work with multiple types of end clients, and because those designers are bringing in varied work, Kacey sees an equally varied cross-section of what's actually being built out there.
The projects themselves tend to be on the larger side — five to twenty pages, often with a blog, occasionally with a shop. They're almost always migrations to Squarespace, or designers whose own clients are coming to Squarespace for the first time. And they always come with a full Figma mockup: a polished, client-approved design at a standard desktop dimension (1440 or 1680px typically), with all copy final and the typography system already established. Kacey's job is to make that static mockup responsive, alive, and launched.
One thing Kacey mentioned that I think is worth underlining: they're not communicating directly with the end client in most cases. The designer manages that relationship. Kacey is present, answers questions, records tutorials on sections they've coded — but the designer is the lead. It's a clean division of labour, and it means the whole thing runs without too many cooks.
Some projects are booked six months out. Some are booked a week out. Kacey's had both in the same month. The offer works either way because the structure is always the same — and that predictability is a large part of why it works.
How clients find them — and why it's mostly courses, not Instagram
Kacey has a great Instagram. Personality absolutely jumps off the screen. But when I asked where their clients actually come from, the answer surprised even me a little: courses.
Not courses in the "staying in school" sense — but as a genuine community strategy. Kacey takes courses, shows up in the cohorts and community channels, and builds real friendships with the other people in the room. Those people are designers, developers, copywriters, photographers — folks in adjacent industries who end up needing what Kacey does, or who know someone who does.
"It's just friends," Kacey said. "You just make a friend. I'm not trying to leverage anything."
And that's exactly why it works. They're not showing up in those spaces with a polished offer and a pitch. They're showing up a little vulnerable, genuinely learning, getting excited about other people's work — "getting jealous of other people's work," as Kacey put it, in the best way. Someone posts something impressive, Kacey figures out who they are and reaches out to say it's cool. That's the whole strategy. It feels good. It leads to real relationships. And real relationships lead to referrals and bookings that don't feel transactional.
Threads comes second, Instagram third. But it's the course communities — the live cohorts especially — that have been the most consistent source of clients from the start.
There's something very sommelier about this approach, actually. Kacey drew the connection themselves: in a restaurant, you don't walk up to every single table trying to sell a bottle of wine. You go to the person who wants one and make their experience exceptional. Don't waste energy on people who aren't looking for what you offer. Find the ones who are, and be genuinely present with them.
Sommelier life vs. developer life — what actually changed
Restaurants teach you things about people that are genuinely hard to learn any other way. Kacey still feels that. The performance of a busy floor, the dynamics of a room, reading what people want before they've said it — all of that came with them into development. It shows up as the hospitality angle they bring to their work: warm, present, excited about your project, genuinely interested in who you are and how you got there. Not "I'm your developer, see you in a week."
What's different is the physical environment. In a restaurant you're surrounded by 300 people on a Friday night — all of that input, all of that energy. Now it's a desk, a code editor, and some music. The brain is still firing the same way, still putting puzzles together. But the social stimulation has to be actively sought out rather than constantly present.
Kacey was candid about this: when you work alone at home all day, you have to schedule the human contact. It doesn't happen by default. A coffee, a walk, getting outside — not optional. And with development specifically, where almost no one around you really understands what you're doing day-to-day, there's an added layer of being in your own head. That walk clears it.
The other thing that's genuinely different: the work gets faster the more you do it. Kacey codes something every day, even on days with no client work — curly brackets, hyphens, just keeping the muscle warm. Take a week off and they can feel themselves slowing down. Keep at it and the same problems that used to stress them out become completely routine. That kind of compound fluency doesn't happen if you treat development as a project-by-project skill rather than a daily practice.
A year in — and 12 Shopify enquiries that changed the plan
Kacey officially launched their development business in February 2024. By the time we spoke, they were heading into year two — and already seeing the kind of momentum that suggests the initial bet on development was exactly right.
The most striking signal: between November and January — not typically a busy season for new project enquiries — Kacey received 12 unsolicited Shopify enquiries. Not referrals from existing clients. Strangers who found them somehow, found their website, filled out the contact form, and asked — sometimes pleaded — for help with their Shopify sites. Services Kacey didn't even offer.
"If someone like Googled you, found you, found your website, filled out your form, and is like begging for a service you don't offer — clearly there's a demand."
So Kacey did what they've done at every other turning point: made a small, sensible move. Enrolled in a Shopify course. Not a dramatic pivot away from Squarespace — Squarespace isn't going anywhere in their heart and soul, as they put it, and they were genuinely enthusiastic about what Squarespace's CEO shared at Circle Day, particularly around bringing bigger brands to the platform. But there's clearly an e-commerce audience that needs Shopify, and there's clearly an overlap with the development skills Kacey already has. Why leave that on the table?
This is the pattern that runs through everything Kacey does. Not a grand strategy. Not a five-year plan. Just: here's a signal, here's a small move, let's see where it goes. It works because they stay curious, stay in communities where they're learning alongside people, and don't overthink themselves into paralysis.
They also log every enquiry in Notion — their CRM, their organisational backbone — so they can actually see when patterns emerge. Twelve Shopify leads in two months isn't a coincidence. It's data. And Kacey pays attention to data.
What Kacey would say to someone on the fence about a course
Paige's courses came up several times throughout our conversation — not just as the starting point for Kacey's Squarespace education, but as a frame for thinking about how to learn well. Their answer when I asked what they'd say to someone considering enrolling was characteristically direct:
"If you are considering building a website for somebody and charging money for it, you should absolutely enrol in a course taught by somebody who's doing that — because it's so much more than just Squarespace."
The distinction Kacey draws is between learning a platform and learning how to use a platform professionally, for paying clients. Squarespace has documentation. It has help articles. What it doesn't have is the lens of someone who's actually run a client-facing design business — who knows what clients ask for, what causes friction, what a professional handoff looks like, how to price, how to communicate. That's what the courses teach. Not just the software.
And if you're on the fence? Kacey's take: you're already there. Just do it. Enrol, get involved, actually do the thing. Because there's no abracadabra — the course doesn't do the work for you. But it gives you the structure and the community to do the work in a way that actually leads somewhere.
That applies to development too, by the way. Kacey codes every single day because the skill compounds. The more you use it, the less it costs you in mental energy, the more you can take on, the calmer the whole business feels. That daily practice is the thing — not the certificates, not the credentials, not waiting until you feel ready.
Kacey's story is a good reminder that the clearest business models often aren't designed in advance — they're discovered by paying attention to what people keep asking for. If every single client you work with somehow ends up needing the same thing, that's not a coincidence. That's your offer. Now go build it.
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