02 ASCEND / Digital

Websites that work hard and look good doing it.

Beautiful on the surface. Thought through underneath.

Sometimes the answer is beautifully simple: explain the business, show the work and make it easy to get in touch. Sometimes it involves subscriptions, bookings, payments, member areas, automations and a backend with enough logic to make our development brains hurt. We like both.

What we can help with
  • Website strategy
  • UX
  • Website design
  • Development
  • Ecommerce
  • Booking systems
  • Memberships
  • Subscription platforms
  • CRM
  • Email automation
  • Bespoke development
  • Integrations
  • Motion
  • Analytics
01 Strategy & UX

Work out the journey first.

Before choosing fonts or making things move, we work out what belongs where. Sitemap, content, hierarchy, user journeys and the little decisions that stop somebody getting three pages deep and wondering where on earth they have ended up.

02 Design

Then make it unmistakably yours.

Your website should feel connected to your brand rather than like your logo has been dropped onto somebody else's template. We design the whole experience around your content, audience and personality.

03 Development

Make the design real.

Responsive builds, CMS, ecommerce, integrations, animation and all the technical bits required to turn the design into something fast, intuitive and ready for real people to use.

04 Automation

Let the website do some of the admin.

CRM integrations, automated emails, customer journeys, forms, payments and workflows can quietly take care of repetitive jobs in the background. Less copying things between spreadsheets is generally a win.

Capability / 04 — Bespoke

Off the shelf?

Sometimes.

Off the wall?

Also sometimes.

Need it to do something oddly specific? Good.

  • Booking platforms
  • Subscriptions
  • Member areas
  • Video libraries
  • Automated onboarding
  • Judging systems
  • Custom payment logic
  • Dashboards

And various things that didn’t come with a handy plugin. We start with how the business needs to work. Then we build around it.

Team UK Performing Arts

One website.
A lot happening underneath.

Team UK needed their entire championship qualification process online. We built a bespoke platform connecting entries, payments, judging, qualification, selection, offers and an automated suite of emails, with a backend their team can manage season after season.

It works the way Team UK works, because that’s exactly what it was built around.

Behind the build →
  • Multi-entry applications
  • Stripe payments
  • Judging portal
  • Qualification & selection
  • Automated offers
  • Season-to-season admin

What you actually get.

The site

A responsive build on a CMS you can actually edit, designed around your content rather than a template that happened to be nearby.

The machinery

Bookings, payments, memberships, ecommerce, integrations and the automations that quietly take the repetitive jobs off somebody’s desk.

The handover

Training, documentation and a site the person who inherits it can run without ringing us every time a price changes.

Made by ASCEND.

See all work →
Process

No smoke and mirrors.

Five stages, in this order, every time.

  1. 01 Discovery Getting clear before we get creative.
  2. 02 Architecture Working out how everything fits together.
  3. 03 Design Turning the structure into something unmistakably yours.
  4. 04 Build Making the design real.
  5. 05 Test + launch Making sure everything works before showtime.
Straight answers

Things people ask.

Do you use templates?

We design around the project. That might mean starting completely from scratch or using existing technology where it saves time and money without compromising what we're trying to achieve. Bespoke shouldn't mean rebuilding something perfectly good for the sake of it.

Can you build bespoke functionality?

Yes. If your website needs bookings, memberships, subscriptions, payments, automations or something rather more peculiar, that's very much our sort of thing.

Can you redesign an existing site?

Absolutely. Not everything needs burning to the ground.

What platform do you build on?

Whatever suits the job. We build a lot on Wix Headless and custom stacks, and we will happily work with what you already have if moving would cost more than it is worth.

Can you connect our CRM and other tools?

Yes. Bookings, payments, email platforms, CRMs and spreadsheets can usually be joined up so information stops being retyped in three places.

What happens after launch?

You can run it yourself, and we will show you how. Plenty of clients keep us on for updates and new features — but that is a choice, not a condition of the site working.

Your website
can do some
of the admin.

CRM integrations, automated emails, forms, payments and connected workflows can quietly take care of repetitive jobs in the background.

Nobody has ever told us they miss copying information between spreadsheets.

Got something your current website can't quite handle?

We'd like to hear about it.

Talk to us about Digital →