How Squarespace Enterprise Helps Gasta Serve Hundreds of Web Design Agency Clients
After upgrading to Squarespace Enterprise:
+ 14 new websites
+ 8 website contributors
+ 96 work hours spent on billing saved per year
+ 1 custom template created to launch 15 sites
Gasta is a Norway-based web design agency that has specialized in building custom Squarespace websites for clients for more than a decade. After growing to launch 600 sites, owner Vidar Bondevik consolidated his team’s site management by upgrading to Squarespace Enterprise—and couldn’t be happier with the results.
“It’s been a great investment and saved us a lot of time by making our processes easier,” he says.
Bondevik felt his agency outgrew the standard Squarespace plans when billing clients became more complex and time-consuming due to the high volume of websites. He says his team would spend at least one full, eight-hour workday per month juggling the logistics of individual client invoicing and credit card payments.
Now with Enterprise bulk billing, Gasta receives two invoices per year that cover all of their client websites, saving them a total of 96 hours annually.
“It’s so much easier now because the invoices list all of our customers—we can quickly check everything and make payments,” he says.
Driving results through the Squarespace Enterprise account manager partnership
While switching to the Enterprise plan solved that immediate billing struggle, Bondevik says he quickly recognized the added value of working with an account manager to support his team’s growth with the platform and to troubleshoot any issues in their workflow.
“What we appreciate most [about Enterprise] is our account manager, Dave,” Bondevik says. “Having that one person in our corner is so helpful when problems come up. We have a good connection and similar communication styles.”
Bondevik explains that he typically speaks with Dave 3-4 times a week through email or video conference and that the partnership has already yielded positive, measurable business results.
“While Squarespace [general] support is really good, sometimes you need to speak to a person—especially if you have these advanced problems,” Bondevik says. “Now when we have a problem, we take it to Dave, and he handles it, or he involves someone else at Squarespace who can.”
Improving team collaboration with Squarespace Enterprise features
According to Bondevik, having access to a host of Enterprise-exclusive features has simplified his team’s website management workflow and increased its security. Before he could assign separate role permissions for each team member, he says his employees shared logins and could not differentiate their capabilities on the platform.
He adds that the Enterprise dashboard is a critical tool for an agency of Gasta’s size to manage many websites and track development updates. Using tagging and filtering, he labels sites with the designers on his team assigned to handle them for quick accountability and transparency.
“Categorizing with tags makes it easier for us to have control over site design progress and also to see which sites have been upgraded to the newest version of Squarespace,” he says.
Creating unlimited Enterprise trial sites that never expire also helps Gasta experiment freely with new designs and present them to clients without fear of time constraints. Bondevik says building standard trial sites that expired after two weeks didn’t suit his team’s need to coordinate with hundreds of clients—many of whom often take much longer to review and approve new designs.
“When you’re working with customers, the [approval] process can take months for many reasons,” he explains. “We used to have to pay to keep trial sites active after two weeks—now we have them for as long as we need them.”
Since some customers require multiple site builds in a compressed timeline, Bondevik says Enterprise templates save his team critical time creating them and ensure adherence to customers’ brand guidelines. One client requested 15 sites with matching specs for each of its franchise locations, so Gasta built a custom template to use as an approved framework for launching each one.
“Using [Enterprise] templates is very exciting—it allows us to put all site content and functionality into one template,” Bondevik explains.
With winning features and strategic account management support, Squarespace Enterprise helps Gasta stay on the cutting edge of client web design and continue to grow.
