I started pursuing web design professionally through school around 2010, and picked up an associate's degree and then a bachelor's in web design and development along the way. What actually stuck from all of that wasn't the code itself — it was one lesson that ended up shaping how I run two businesses today.
What the degree actually covered
The technical training was exactly what you'd expect — building sites, understanding structure and design, learning the mechanics of how a website actually functions. That part of the education did its job. By the time I finished, I genuinely knew how to build something functional and good-looking from the ground up.
The gap nobody warned me about
What the degree didn't prepare me for was the gap between "I can build this" and "people can find this." Those feel like they should be the same skill, or at least closely related ones. They're not. You can build a technically excellent website and still have almost no one see it, because building and getting found are two entirely separate problems that require entirely separate skills to solve.
How that gap pushed me somewhere new
I ran into that gap directly once I was running my own shop — a well-built site that wasn't getting the traffic it needed. That pushed me hard into learning SEO, marketing, and specifically Pinterest, none of which were part of the original web design education. I had to go learn a second skill set on top of the first one, because the degree got me to "built" but not to "found."
Why that one realization shaped two businesses
That gap is the entire reason Marie Glow Studio exists. Once I'd closed it for my own shop, I realized how many other small business owners were sitting in exactly the same spot — a site that existed, and no real plan for getting anyone to it. The web design degree gave me the technical foundation. Closing the gap it didn't cover is what turned into a second business built specifically to help other people close that same gap in their own shops.
If you've got a website that's technically solid and still feels invisible, that's not a sign you built it wrong. It's a sign you're standing exactly where I was — and it's a solvable problem, just not the same one a web design education actually teaches.