Ascend is a small studio building custom websites for small businesses — designed, hosted, and quietly maintained so you can focus on running your business.
Tight focus, deep care. No bloat, no upsells, no adding features just to pad an invoice.
Three of our latest builds — all live right now. Click any of them to see the work in the wild.
A video-first site for a two-piano, all-request show working weddings and corporate events in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana. The hero plays footage shot at a real show, a song-request slip doubles as the first step of the booking form, and the three-state service area is stated throughout.
Visit live site ↗
Built for a flight school at Emmett Municipal Airport taking students from a first discovery flight through checkride. Live field weather read off the METAR, a full fleet and rate card, instructor profiles, and booking handed off to Flight Circle.
Visit live site ↗
A nine-page site for a scratch bakery, espresso bar and kitchen on N Orchard St, with a custom ordering system behind it. Card payments run through Clover, every order writes a line into the kitchen’s Google Sheet, and a 48-hour lead time is enforced server-side.
Visit live site ↗
Mike & Jamilly — founders
We're a husband-and-wife team building websites for small businesses out of Idaho. We started Ascend because getting a professional site online shouldn't mean agency prices, month-long timelines, or talking to five people who aren't the ones doing the work.
Mike comes from years in technology, customer experience, and business consulting — the practical side of making tech actually solve problems. Jamilly brings the eye: design, creativity, and a feel for what makes a site warm, trustworthy, and genuinely yours. Together, that's the whole job — sites that work, and sites that feel right.
No CMS to wrestle with. No template everyone else is using. No jargon. Just one really good page, built carefully, by the two people you'll actually be talking to.
Design earns a customer's trust. Search brings the customer in the first place. Every site we build is made to be found on Google — and for Studio clients, we set up the local presence that puts you in front of nearby people the moment they search.
Fast, mobile-first, and structured with clean code and schema markup — so Google can actually read and rank your site, not just admire it.
We target the searches your neighbors really type — like "wallpaper installer in Caldwell" — and get your Google Business Profile set up so you show up in the map and "near me" results.
Location pages, a review strategy, and Google Search Console tracking, so your visibility compounds month over month instead of standing still.
of diners look up a restaurant online before they ever walk in the door.
WebFXof homeowners now prefer to find and book services online instead of the phone book.
Hook Agencyof patients read online reviews as their very first step in finding a new provider.
Software Adviceof consumers search for local businesses every week — 32% every single day.
SOCiSources: Google / Think with Google, BrightLocal, WebFX, Software Advice, Hook Agency, and SOCi (2024–2026). Figures reflect U.S. consumer search behavior.
Whatever you do, your next customer is already searching for it. Let's make sure they find you.
Start a project →Four stages, no surprises. You're never more than a step away from launch.
We talk. About your business, your customers, what's working, what isn't, and what a good website actually looks like for you specifically.
A complete first draft, designed in browser. You see real type, real layout, real interaction — not a flat mockup that lies about how it'll feel.
One round of revisions, end to end. Copy edits, photo swaps, layout adjustments — handled until it's right.
Domain pointed, SSL active, contact form wired up, you go live. From there, we either hand off the file or quietly keep it running.
From kickoff to launch, about two weeks — not two months.
Start the process→Every site is custom-designed, hosted, and quietly cared for. The only question is how much work you want it doing — a business online, a store, or a tool that runs part of the job for you.
A polished site — live on your own domain, forms working, and updates handled for you, forever.
A real online store with secure checkout — sell products or take orders right from your own site.
Card processing (about 2.9–3.3% + 30¢ per sale) is billed by Stripe or Square directly — Ascend never takes a cut of your sales.
A website and a working tool behind it — the thing you're still doing by hand, handled.
Automation doesn't have to wait for a rebuild. If you're on The Studio or The Storefront and there's one job eating your week, we can build the tool for it and bolt it on. The first one carries the design and setup; anything after that reuses the same foundation, so it costs less.
If yours isn't here, just send a note — we usually reply same day.
About two weeks from kickoff to launch is typical, assuming you can get me copy and photos within a few days of our discovery call. If your content is already in good shape, we've shipped in under ten.
The thing that slows projects down isn't design or development — it's waiting on copy and approvals. We can talk about that on the call.
That's fine. For copy, We'll send a short questionnaire and write a first draft from your answers — you edit, we refine. For photography, we'll either guide you on what to take with your phone (it's better than you think) or recommend a local photographer for a half-day shoot.
Yes. Most projects start that way. Your old site keeps running until the new one is approved and live — there's never a gap, and your domain stays exactly where it is.
You take the site with you. The whole point of how we build is portability — no proprietary platform lock-in, no fees to extract your own work. We'll hand off the files, point your domain wherever you want, and part on good terms.
E-commerce, yes — that's our Storefront package: a real online store with secure Stripe or Square checkout, connected to your own account. Multi-page sites, also yes, up to about ten pages. The one thing we don't take on is complex web applications — custom software, dashboards, booking engines and the like — where we're glad to point you toward developers who specialize in that.
Two things. First, every site is custom — designed from your business, not picked from a library. Second, you talk to the people actually building it, every time. No project managers, no ticket queues, no offshore handoffs. Just the two of us, who know your site inside out.
Ascend Design Studio is absolutely life changing! Mike has done an incredible job on my website. I have searched for nearly a year in finding the right fit for my business needs. My experience working with him has been excellent. If I could give 10 stars I would!
They have exceptional customer care, but the best part has been the results. I wanted to wait to leave a review to make sure everything was working properly. We were getting little to no leads from Google before working with Ascend, with referrals being our #1 lead generator, and now we are getting multiples per week.
Since the new site launched, my business has seen noticeable growth. The website is fast, clean, and highly informative — exactly what patients are looking for. I've had multiple new patients tell me they chose my practice specifically because of how easy it was to navigate my site, find the information they needed, and feel confident contacting me.
Ascend Design Studio did an absolute incredible job creating a website for me. Not only does it look absolutely stunning, but it has also brought in higher-quality business traffic, and generated real results. Professional, creative, and easy to work with from start to finish. Highly recommend!
Tell us a little about your business and what you're trying to fix. We'll write back within a day with a few thoughts and we'll see if it's a fit.
Replies within 24 hours, weekdays. Idaho time.