Meet Squarespace: Jamie Tsao

Director of Engineering Jamie Tsao is always up for an adventure. However, he describes his adventure of deciding to move to New York City to join the Squarespace team "a whirlwind of excitement, anxiety, and stress."

In eight short weeks, he and his wife Ranee had to contend with quitting their jobs, subletting their apartment, finding an apartment while still in San Francisco, and packing up their entire lives in order to move across the country and start over. Despite all the insanity, Jamie and Ranee managed to arrive in New York in style. Thanks to his sister who worked for the airline, they were both upgraded to first class on their momentus trip. For Jamie, this was a clear sign he had made the right decision.

He joined Squarespace in August 2009.

Name: Jamie Tsao

Job Title: Director of Engineering

What do you actually do every day? As Director of Engineering, I lead a team of engineers, deploy new code on a weekly basis, and keep Squarespace up and running. Most recently, I re-architected our backend integration with Twitter by switching to their Streaming API. In addition to improving resource efficiency, our Twitter widgets now display tweets in real-time.

What is your background? I'm originally from California (born and raised).  I got a late start on computers - I didn't actually touch one until I was in college at Berkeley (Go Bears!). My fascination for software was born immediately after taking my first computer science course (CS3), and I guess the rest is history.

Who do you admire and why? My mother, because she was the most positive person I knew. My attitude towards life is heavily influenced by her.

Favorite thing about working at Squarespace: Without a doubt the privilege of working with our strong Engineering team. Oh, and the free lunches are nice too.

What do you do for fun outside of work? Photography, Black Ops, online poker, rooting for my Bay Area sports team, and exploring this wonderful city.

Top blogs in your RSS reader? To be honest, I'm not an avid blog reader but I do peruse a few tech blogs: TechCrunch, Mashable, Martin Fowler, etc.

Last 5 songs played on your iPod? Eminem's Recovery album, my favorite song being "No Love" featuring Lil Wayne.

5 fun facts about yourself:

• I won a week-long trip & entry into a poker tournament in Aruba via an online poker site.
• I played an extra in the 2nd Matrix movie, The Matrix Reloaded.
• Because of my name, I'm often mistaken as spanish or a girl.
• I love McDonald's Filet-O-Fish.
• I got married in Hawaii.

If you could pick one superpower, invisibility or flying, which would you pick? Why?

Definitely flying, because then I could do cool stuff like save the world. Being invisible only seems useful for criminal activities. And I ain't no criminal.

Stay in touch with Jamie via his personal blog at JamieTsao.com or on Twitter @eimajination.

How Do You Squarespace? Meet Simon Lunt Design

Simon Lunt never meant to be a web designer.

In 2008, U.K. based Lunt was happily working in advertising, pinch-hitting for big agencies including Saatchi & Saatchi, Mother, Publicis, EHS and more. Then the financial crash hit and the whole industry was turned upside down.

By the following year Lunt was laid off from his job, and, unsure what he planned to do next, he quickly realized he had no desire to go back to a job working for someone else. "I hate routine. Going to work at 9am every day felt like being back at school."

After taking a look around, polling friends, and doing some research, he began to notice that everyone seemed to need a website. However, all of his design experience had been in print thus far, and, as he puts it, "I knew jack about websites." 

A friend of Lunt's suggested that he look into Squarespace as an option. He signed up for the 14-day trial and the rest is history. While Lunt continues to do some branding/logo work, the majority of his time is now spent as a freelance Squarespace site designer through his company Lunt Design.

Who are some of your design influences?

I don't go to galleries, collect books of other people's work, or anything like that. I love old school movie posters and great typography. Banksy is doing some great stuff, but I mainly thrive off of and am inspired by my friends. I am surrounded by photographers, designers, writers and film makers. We are always chucking ideas about and creating great work. 'Don't look up at anyone, do what you want' is my motto.

Why does Squarespace work for you?

Squarespace gave me the ability to use my design skills rather than get bogged down by code. 

The web for me is full of rubbish and that makes me angry. There are so many poor looking sites, and lots are created by companies or individuals saying they are "designers," but these guys have had no training or experience, and it shows. 

Don't get me started on WP Themes because it might make me cry. I used to think the existence of those devalued my skill set, and that clients wouldn't pay the rates that I charge. But soon enough they all come back.

So to me, Squarespace gives "real'" designers with no knowledge of coding the tools to create something pretty damn good. And once you get to grips with a bit of code and dig deeper, it's wonderful. In 18 months I have now done sites for at least 25 clients across the globe and exclusively work within the Squarespace platform.

Aside from web design, what else do you dig doing? And what would you be doing professionally if you were not a web designer?

I still design logos and do branding. In the past I have rebranded Playboy, Tesco Clubcard, Churchill and Scottish Widows, to name a few. I have also started developing for iOS and have a site up, Teleportfolio, which offers custom-made iPad portfolios apps for creatives. You cannot beat a print portfolio for impact but the next best thing is the iPad. It will become the standard way to show off your work I reckon. So we took what was the best features of the other existing apps and made them better. And got rid of things that made them break or didn't work. The result is Teleportfolio.

Most importantly for me is the time I have now to take photos, do illustration, mess about with video, knock a tune out -- anything creative really. It's in my blood.

I cannot imagine doing anything else aside from design. Maybe playing football in a dream world (am not calling it soccer!) -- Liverpool FC no.9!

What's next for you?

I have big plans for our iPad portfolio app and some other iOS stuff we are working on. And I would also like to concentrate on doing folio sites for creatives. The main aim is to be able to work from anywhere in the world, whenever I want. I cannot think of anything better than living on the beach with a wifi connection. That's all I need.

Where can we find you online? 

My main design site is luntdesign.co.uk and our iPad portfolio app is at teleportfolio.co.uk. Twitter accounts are @silunt and @teleportfolio.

Top Flight Support

As Squarespace has grown over the years, our commitment to providing top-notch customer support has always been our top priority. Despite opportunities to save a buck, we've focused on building a support team full of Squarespace power-users, each of whom know our platform inside out and upside down.

Today we begin a steady stream of support improvements as we start to roll out our brand new Help & Support Center. Our goal here is simple: to make finding answers to your Squarespace-related questions even easier.

In our first round of changes, visible today, we've replaced our existing Manual and FAQ pages. When you visit the new Help & Support Center, you’ll find all of the tools that you've come to rely on - our Getting Started guide, our help videos, and all our previously published support content - all in one location, searchable and browseable by topic. You will now be able to rate and flag our support content, so that our team can quickly stay on top of the needs of our customers and improve our materials on an ongoing basis.

Our new support ticketing system will be introduced shortly. The new system will allow you to submit tickets just as you do today, but improvements on the back-end will give our support specialists faster access to customer information and your support history, as well as give you the ability to interact over email and submit screenshots with tickets.    

We constantly strive to improve our industry-leading customer support here at Squarespace, and hope you find these changes to be a welcome improvement. Visit our Help & Support Center at http://help.squarespace.com.

We'll Do It Live

On Wednesday, we enhanced our backend integration with Twitter by switching over to their Streaming API. What that means for you is that there are no more refresh intervals. Send a tweet, refresh your page, and there it is. The better news is, we're still caching your tweets, so the widget's uptime is still independent from Twitter's. All the gain, none of the pain. 

Go ahead and give it a try for yourself!

Meet Squarespace: Stephen Parker

Senior Designer Stephen Parker doesn't take no for an answer - he wanted to work on the Squarespace design team badly. “I knew this job was going to be mine one day. I just had no idea how or when."

Stephen always knew his ultimate goal, even while freelancing for Squarespace for several years (designing templates for version 5) and subsequently joining our support team. Throughout, he worked hard at cultivating a relationship with Creative Director Tyler Thompson. Conversations between them often went something like this:

Stephen: So, when are you going to hire me? I'm dying to come and work with you guys.

Tyler: Dude, you're not ready. Go read about color theory.

Back and forth they went, each time Tyler pushing Stephen a bit further along on his creative journey. All along the way, Parker refused to give up.

As Tyler tells it:

Stephen asked for a design job at Squarespace 3 times and each time I said no, but gave him my specific reasons. First I asked him to work on color and spacing. I suggested some reading and designs and designers to study and follow. Later his designs lacked the final polish. He continued to study and always pushed himself to be a better designer. I started seeing his work on Dribbble and the Squarespace forum, and they were really, really good. He knew our brand inside and out, knew the system as well as anyone (from working support), and had really blossomed into a damn good designer.

Needless to say, Stephen's "stubbornness" finally paid off when he moved to New York and officially joined the Squarespace design team full-time in December of 2010.

Name: Stephen Parker

Position: Senior Designer

What do you actually do every day? Mostly I'm in Photoshop designing something new, building pages on Squarespace, or making tweaks to something that already exists. I'm responsible for the majority of creative assets that go out for the current version of our system. So, that includes maintenance and expansion of our front site, advertisements, direction for promo videos, art for blog posts, press kits, email newsletters, landing pages, etc.

What is your background? I'm an artist. I grew up cooking professionally in restaurants, and I've always enjoyed creating things with my hands. For me, art is mostly crafting in a series of rotating mediums; paint, food, music, design, etc.

Favorite thing about working at Squarespace? Definitely the cast. Squarespace is filled with an unbelievable collection of brilliant people.

Who do you admire and why? Kenya Hara is the Art Director for Muji. He has great thoughts on "memory" and "emptiness". Tyler Thompson, my boss, is the most visually intelligent person that I know.

Top 3 Blogs in your RSS reader?

• Signal vs. Noise
• Effed in Park Slope
• Synaptic Stimuli

Last 5 Songs played on your iPod?

• River of Brake Lights -- Julian Casablancas
• Queen Bitch -- David Bowie
• Holy Thursday -- David Axelrod
• Veridis Quo -- Daft Punk
• Plasticities -- Andrew Bird

5 Fun facts about yourself?

• I play stringed instruments.
• I'm a chef for the royal family of Dubai.
• My parents are both social workers.
• I'm an over-the-roll folder.
• I have a 12-year-old daughter who is much smarter than me.

Stay in touch with Stephen! He's taking questions over on his blog, Hi Stephen, or you can follow him on Twitter @stephen_parker.