How I Got Started in Web Design (& Had No Idea What Was Coming)

I always say my web design career started in a high school class taught by Sandy Mockler. It was an HTML class, which sounds boring unless you were there, because something about that class clicked for me. It was creative. It felt like painting with code. I wasn’t good at sitting still or following strict rules, but this was the kind of structured chaos I could thrive in.

The first real website I ever built was for a soap company. A family friend knew I was artsy and into photography, and one day they just asked, “Hey, could you build a site?” I said yes, even though I had no idea what I was doing. That site? It went on to become a multi-million-dollar brand — I’m talking direct competition with Dove, Dr. Squatch, all of it.

Back then, I was using Wix., and I’ve stuck with it this whole time. I started in 2009, because I saw a commercial for it while watching Criminal Minds. This was before drag-and-drop was a thing people took seriously. I’ve never coded, well except for that High School web design class. But I knew how to design. I was also knee deep in Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, Canva, anything visual on the computer, I was on it. I didn’t just teach myself web design. I taught myself branding, social media graphics, product packaging, logos, the whole ecosystem, just because I loved it.

Here’s the wild part: I was around when the company went public in November of 2013. I was a freshman in college, no sense of what I wanted to do with my life, and still figuring out where the dining hall was. They invited me to invest. Literally invited me to invest in the company’s IPO. And I missed the email.

I didn’t even know what investing was. I saw the message months later and was like… huh. Cool. Wish someone had explained what that meant. While I was stressing about what job I was going to get, "webdesigner" was staring me straight in the face yelling "Invest in me, invest in yourself, dammit!"

A couple years ago, I thought maybe I’d go the corporate route. UX design jobs were calling my name. I was landing third and fourth-round interviews at Hilton, Walmart, United, Frontier, Brad’s Deals, even some random insurance company I couldn’t name now if I tried. Every time, the feedback was the same: “Your designs are great, but you don’t have corporate experience.” They weren’t wrong. I didn’t. I had real-world experience, launching brands from scratch, talking directly to clients, handling everything from design to strategy. I just didn’t have a resume with a company logo stamped on top of it.

So I pivoted. I reached out to a couple Hutterite colonies. Asked if they needed a website. They said yes, full price, no questions asked. That moment right there? That’s when I knew this was going to be big.

This business wasn’t built in a lab or a boardroom. It was built from trust, late nights, a hundred tiny risks, and saying yes before I was ready. And now? Now it’s everything! So here’s your sign.

Start the thing. Take the leap. Follow your childhood passions. Trust yourself...and maybe even the universe a little. You have no idea what it could turn into.