Our founder, Nicole Hanusek, joined Alison Ver Halen of AV Writing Services on her Marketing Spotlight podcast to talk about her 27+ years of designing and coding websites. The conversation was recorded in 2025 and the episode was released in 2026, so the numbers and examples reflect where things stood at the recording. You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen on Buzzsprout.
The conversation covered how she got started, why our team builds only in WordPress, who owns a website, and what sends visitors straight to the back button. This is the short version.
In this post:
- Nicole got her first web design job by copying a classmate’s internship search and admitting in the interview that she did not know what web design was.
- Building a website used to be one person’s job, and we still hire people who can do both the design and the code.
- Working in one platform for years means the team knows what is going on under the hood when something breaks.
- Where your website is hosted decides how much of it you control and what an SEO provider is able to change.
- A loading spinner on arrival sends visitors to the back button, and a slow page costs you search visibility and business.
It Started With a Copied Internship Plan
Nicole was studying illustration at the Cleveland Institute of Art when a classmate in the computer lab went looking for graphic design internships. It seemed like a smart idea, so Nicole copied her. The search landed her a job at a web design company, where the interviewer asked why she wanted to do this work. She did not know what the work was. She needed money. He hired her anyway.
She stayed about four years, two while in college and two full time, and learned most of what she knows about web consulting there. After a move from Cleveland to the Bay Area, she spent two and a half years at Alexa Internet, working on a single brand. She missed the variety of consulting, where one week might bring a company that supplies puppies for parties, with the puppies up for adoption, and the next a philanthropic advisor, a job she had not known existed. So she quit and started freelancing. The business she started then is Smack Happy Design.
The name came while she was still at Alexa. She had spent a month trying to find a name with an available domain that was easy to spell and easy to remember, and had nothing. A coworker who was annoying her yet again settled it. The thought that she was about to go smack happy on him became the name.
Websites Used to Be One Person’s Job
When Nicole started, a website was a simple HTML page built for desktop, and one person did all of it, including a light amount of design. Today the work is split among visual designers, UX designers, front-end coders and back-end coders, with deeper specialties such as the API work her software engineer husband does sitting beyond those.
She went the other direction when she began hiring. She was stubborn about finding people who do both design and code, and she now leads a team of about eight of what she calls rare unicorns, scattered across the US with one person in England and one in Greece. Many of them also come from an art background, which she sees as part of why the combination works.
Why We Only Build in WordPress
When Nicole started the company, she researched how to make freelancing work, and the advice that kept coming up was to choose a niche. She chose WordPress. Every hire since has known it well, and the payoff is a team that is good at working out what is happening under the hood when something goes wrong.
A recent example involved text shifting out of its boxes and circles in a design. The cause was a conflict between the theme and Bootstrap, a CSS framework. The theme had a framework of its own, so the browser was receiving two sets of styling instructions and could not decide which to follow.
Most builds start with Beaver Builder, a drag and drop editor in the same family as Divi, WPBakery and Elementor. Nicole rates it the best of the group because what you see in the editor matches what visitors get. It is also lighter, so it loads faster for the person editing and for the person visiting. Nothing is built from a template. The team starts from scratch, so clients are not paying for a handful of parts grabbed from somewhere else.
Who Owns Your Website
The host asked whether WordPress is the platform where you really own your content. Nicole’s answer was yes, with a distinction. WordPress comes in a hosted version and a self-hosted version. The hosted version works like Wix and Squarespace, where the company running the platform sets the limits. The self-hosted version runs on your own hosting account with a provider such as HostGator, GoDaddy or Bluehost, and there you own the site and can get under the hood.
That matters for SEO. Someone you hire to improve your search performance can change far more on a self-hosted WordPress site than on a closed platform. Both Nicole and the host noted that Wix and Squarespace allow some SEO work, but it is limited.
The details sit in the terms of service, which most people click through without reading. Read them before you build on any platform. A website is your online real estate, and it is better to own it.
Animations and Load Speed
Asked what makes her wince, Nicole named needless animation. A loading spinner or countdown that greets visitors on arrival is the worst example, because most people hit the back button instead of waiting. Animation earns its place when it supports a purpose. Content that slides in from the side as you scroll is fine, since it is light, does not slow the page and makes the site feel dynamic.
Speed got the most attention. Nicole said search engines take page loading speed into account when deciding whether to show your page to mobile or desktop searchers, and that visitors lose interest quickly when a page drags. The host put the tipping point at about three seconds and noted that a five-second load is an eternity online.
Nicole’s advice is to test your own site today with any of the free speed tools, such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights, and to ask your developer to look into it if the results are poor. If your bounce rate is high or climbing, check load speed first. There is always someone else doing what you do, and a slow page sends your visitors to them.
If you are not sure how your own site performs or what is going on behind it, our Deep Dive Website Assessment looks at the files, database and history for a flat $600, with a written report in one to three business days.
