One person. Twenty-five years. No account managers.
I'm Erik Bertrand. Ascent is my studio, and when you hire it you get me — the same person on the call, in the code, and answering the email eighteen months later.
How I got here.
The long view.
I've been building things for the web since the late nineties, which means I have written more raw HTML than I care to total up and have watched several confident predictions about the future of the web fail to arrive. That length of view is most of what you're buying. It's why I'm slow to recommend the newest thing and quick to ask what happens to your site in five years, when whoever built it has moved on.
What enterprise taught me.
Most of that career was in enterprise software — large systems, real traffic, the kind of infrastructure where a mistake is measured in incidents rather than in a broken page. Most recently I led a cloud migration for a platform that once ably handled roughly six billion emails a month. That work taught me the discipline I now bring to sites a thousand times smaller: plan the migration, keep the links, test on the real thing, and never launch on a Friday.
Why Ascent exists.
Alongside it I've always kept a small practice for businesses and nonprofits that need a website and don't need an agency. I've always enjoyed working in this sphere, and it's something I want to do much more of. Ascent exists because there's a real gap between the cheapest option, which leaves you with something you can't maintain, and an agency, which quotes five figures before anyone has looked at your content.
How I work.
Plainly. I'll tell you what something will cost before I do it, tell you when you don't need the thing you asked for, and tell you if the honest answer is that you'd be better served by someone else, or even a template you can run yourself. I've talked more than one client out of a project. It's a bad sales tactic and a good way to still be working with people a decade later.
I work well with people who aren't technical and don't want to be. No jargon, no condescension, and no assumption that you should already know what a DNS record is. Explaining the thing clearly is part of the work, not a favour. I'm here to help you with your tech needs so you can focus on your business and goals.
Off the clock.
I'm a native New Englander, born and raised in New Hampshire and now based on Cape Cod. While I like an evening in, I also enjoy travel and adventure.
I've hiked all 115 of the 4,000-foot mountains in the Northeast. In the winter. This took considerably longer than any website I've built, of course. I also sing in choirs, which is how several of my past projects came to be.
The mountain in the logo isn't decoration. It's where I like to spend free time, and "ascent" was a natural choice to bridge that passion, and my passion of helping others reach their online potential.
Erik has been just what we’ve needed, just when we’ve needed him! He quickly grasps occasional challenges that we face on the technical side of our website, diagnoses them, and discusses solutions with us before implementing them. He has also helped us with a major [Google Workspace] systems migration, which went extremely smoothly, despite many complicated steps that had to be accomplished. He worked with our staff to make this as seamless as possible.
Let's talk about your site.
Thirty minutes, free, no pitch. Bring the problem in whatever words you have for it — sorting out what you actually need is the first part of the job.
I reply to every message within one business day.