Hi, I’m Kelsey. Meet Squarespace 7.1 and Fluid Engine

(upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Kelsey Gilbert-Kreiling. I'm really happy we're gonna be doing this course together. I have been using Squarespace for like a hundred years and I love the platform, I think it's really exciting. I think it's really fun and I'm really looking forward to sharing some of its less used, less discovered, but really, really powerful features. So this video is gonna just be a little introduction to me, to the course and I won't I won't make it too long because I don't wanna keep you from the actual design work you're gonna start doing.

But yeah, figured it would be worth just a little hi, hello. So like I said, I'm Kelsey, Kels, and I am the co-founder of a web design agency called Week of the Website. We opened about nine years ago and the goal was to create a place where we could work with clients to build websites that were beautiful and functional and interesting and also like very easy for our clients to use once we launched them. I was not interested in making money from people for changing out images and I really wanted to feel like we were helping people build tools for their businesses, not just static billboards, as my team has heard me say a hundred thousand times.

So we have now grown, we're based in Chicago but we've got a team of about 15 spread all over the country and they are really the heart and soul of Week of the Website. They do amazing, amazing things and I'm excited to share with you a little bit of how we work and what we do to help our clients' sites go beyond, right? So this course is called Better Than Launched. My thinking is is that websites are never done. They're just brought online, right? They're just launched.

And it's always going to be a process of continuing to evolve what you do, what you sell, what you talk about. And Squarespace is a great platform for it. We've always chosen to use it because it sits right at the intersection of creative customization and usability. So I'm gonna really lean into showing you how to use the platform, in all of these really interesting and creative ways. There are so many courses out there that specialize in using custom code to make sites that don't look like Squarespace websites at all.

But with the advent of Fluid Engine and Squarespace 7.1, I think there's so much that you can do using just the platform out of the box. Now that said, if you are really interested in using custom code to, you know, make your site do things that are really specific or change design elements, I'm gonna support you with that too. I'm hoping to have a little cookbook recipe book for each of these chapters so that you can have some fun code to like really dial in the details and the design.

But I want you to feel like even if you've never used CSS, never touched HTML, you can do this course. My son is really into the movie "Ratatouille" right now which he calls cook-cook mouse, adorably, but one of the central tenets of that film that that cinematic classic, is that anyone can cook. I really believe that anyone can build a website on Squarespace. Everything I know is just things that I've accumulated from learning and doing and Googling. And I really want you to feel as you go into this course that you can totally do this too.

If you're looking to create a portfolio. If you're looking to set up an e-commerce shop. If you're looking to start a blog or use marketing tools to talk about your business, this course is hopefully gonna put you in a really good position to do that. So, I'm grateful that you're here. I'm excited to dive in. I think it's gonna be a really fun course. And yeah, I hope you learn a lot. (upbeat music)