![]() |
| Graphic created by Hard Pass Creative |
On her birthday, July 1, in 2016, Katherine Forbes purchased the domain for Designing The Row. Originally, the site was used as a blog to document her career in artist management. She would share the analytics she was tracking or the types of marketing emails she was sending. The more she did for artists, the more she realized that the most critical piece of marketing was a fully developed website.
10 years later, her services are now an internationally trusted Squarespace design agency and educational platform across many industries.
She had spent years working in artist management, loving certain aspects and stressing over others. It all led back to the website, and if she didn’t have control over the website or if the website was not in decent working order, there was only so much she could do. She refers to a website as the home base. Social media is for sharing, while a website is for the actual business. Anyone selling a service or a product should have an easily accessible platform, and she quickly learned that many artists were lacking this crucial aspect.
A series of events led to the inception of Designing The Row. First, her boss at DS Management announced her retirement. Then she landed an interview that, on paper, was her dream job. There was something she couldn’t quite put her finger on during the interview, but she knew it wasn’t meant to be. She had something much bigger to plan instead.
“It was that moment that I [knew] I was going to do this my way,” she said. “I didn’t want my creativity to be controlled by people and old processes and systems.”
A few months after purchasing the domain, she created the Music Biz Besties Facebook group. She was looking for a place to share ideas beyond her happy hour group in Nashville, and thought that surely others would want a space to do the same. If everyone invited one or two people into the group, maybe a total of 10-15 people would be interested. By the end of the week, 200 people would join.
2017 was when she officially made the transition into web design, with the intention of staying within the music industry. As she brought her ideas up to other people, they shared their opinions that she should offer her services beyond music. She enjoyed the simplicity of creating an artist’s website, but found that she also loved the challenge of creating for businesses and organizations.
Despite branching outside of the music industry for web design, music remains her first love for a multitude of reasons. She has played piano since she was 7 years old, majoring in piano performance as well as music technology. Her background in coding actually came from her studies at Virginia Tech, learning it during a time where custom coding was considered lavish.
“At the end of the day, piano is always what I come back to,” she said. “That’s why I came to Nashville. That’s why I was in artist management. It all comes back to music for me.”
At a time where creative fields are threatened with the unwelcome advances of artificial intelligence, Forbes found a positive aspect that has driven her business forward in a way she was not expecting. Over the last few months, her services have been recommended by way of AI chatbots and introduced her to nearly a dozen new clients.
However, she stands by the idea that in order to succeed, all one needs is to have one person that believes in them. For her, it was her piano professor. She gave Forbes a difficult piece of music to memorize in just four months, knowing that she had the skills to do it. It was also her boss at DS Management, who emailed her established contact list to inform them that Forbes was starting her own business. Sending that email helped her build a portfolio of high profile clients, and that impressive portfolio is what search engines recommend when asking chatbots for website designers.
“Whether it’s believing in yourself or just leaning into that one person that believes in you, it can really get you far,” she said.
Designing the Row is known and sought out for its clean, simple design style that prioritizes usability and messaging over trends. Katherine Forbes believes websites should be an asset that grows alongside brands and businesses, and her goal is to empower clients with clarity, confidence and ownership to make that a reality.









