Local team shaking things up in web-design

Redwood Valley couple Hannah and Nick Ippolito used the time being house-bound during lockdown to turn a long-lingering idea into a reality.

The reality, a web-design tool that does the hard, behind the scenes, coding for web designers, launched this week. And is busy acquiring interest internationally with big contenders in the web design arena.

Founder Nick Ippolito, a self-taught coder, was running his own web-design business when he hired Rowan Findlay to help him out. Covid lockdown happened and the idea for the tool that had been kicking around in Nick’s head for over a year began to take form.

The downtime, with clients dropping off, provided the best opportunity to develop the creative idea like this, says Hannah Ippolito. To have that mental space in which to come up with the ideas to make it work.

“The first few weeks we were working 80 hours a week,” says Nick.

They employed Nat Booth, the fourth member of the team who had been made redundant because of the knock-on from Covid.

“We were driven by the idea that there must be a way to provide designers with a better level of control,” says Nick Ippolito.

Believing in the project so much, Nick and Hannah have self-funded it through a second mortgage on their home.

“It feels a bit like whiplash, to be honest,” says Hannah.

“Here we are, four people, from Nelson, New Zealand, who had a vague idea about making web-designing easier and that vague idea is now being shared with the world.”

The tool they created, SquareKicker, is a design tool which doesn’t require knowledge of the IT language. It also allows the users, professional designers and DIY builders, to create SquareSpace websites faster and with greater control, says Hannah.

“Without needing to write a single line of code,” says Nick.