Acara Design Studios

Design + development, one pair of hands

Your website, and everything running behind it.

Acara is a one-person studio for small businesses. I design your site and build the systems behind it — the storefront, the admin tools, even the product itself — so you never have to translate between a designer and a developer.

Get a quote See selected work

No account managers. You talk to the person doing the work.

Services

One practice, three kinds of build.

Most projects touch more than one of these. That's the point — the same person carries your project from the first sketch to the last database migration.

01 · FRONT-END

A site that wins you customers

Marketing sites, online stores, and brand refreshes that look like the business you actually run — fast to load, easy to find, and clear about what you sell.

Good for: a new site, a redesign, a store that finally sells online

02 · ADMIN & BACKEND

Tools that give you your week back

Client portals, dashboards, and sites your team can update themselves — so the numbers live in one place and nobody emails a spreadsheet around again.

Good for: booking & billing admin, internal tools, CMS-driven sites

03 · PRODUCT

Your own product, built to launch

If your business is the tool — an MVP or subscription web app scoped to launch small, charge real customers, and grow without a rebuild.

Good for: a first version, a paid pilot, replacing a duct-taped spreadsheet

Selected work

Real problems, shipped answers.

BrewTraq — product screenshot

BrewTraq

SAAS PRODUCT

THE PROBLEM

A craft-beverage distributor was tracking keg loans and returns across four spreadsheets and a group chat. Kegs went missing; invoices went out late.

WHAT I BUILT

A subscription web app: keg tracking with driver check-ins from a phone, automatic invoicing, and a live view of where every keg is.

THE RESULT

The spreadsheets are retired, invoices go out the day a keg comes back, and BrewTraq now sells to three other distributors as a product.

TrailPass — site & admin screenshot

TrailPass

FRONT-END ADMIN BACKEND

THE PROBLEM

A regional trail association sold day passes on paper at trailheads. Visitors showed up without cash; rangers spent weekends doing data entry.

WHAT I BUILT

A public site with online pass sales and trail conditions, plus an admin dashboard where rangers scan passes and see daily sales at a glance.

THE RESULT

Over 70% of passes now sell online before visitors arrive, and end-of-month reporting went from a weekend to a button.

How I work

The same four steps, every project.

This is the actual order things happen in — not a diagram made for a website. You'll always know which step we're on.

  1. 1

    Discovery

    We talk about your business first, not the tech. What you sell, who buys it, what's slow or broken today. You get a written scope and a quote.

  2. 2

    Design

    You see how it will look and work — real pages, real words — and approve it before anything is built. Changes are cheap here, so we make them here.

  3. 3

    Build

    I build exactly what we approved, with short check-ins in plain language — a link you can click, not a status report you have to decode.

  4. 4

    Launch & support

    I launch it, hand you the keys with a walkthrough, and stay available for fixes and updates. The person who built it is the person who answers.

Why one person

When the designer and the developer are the same person, nothing gets lost in the hand-off — because there isn't one.

One contract, one contact

No coordinating a designer and a developer who've never met. You email one person, and that person can fix anything on the project.

Design that knows its cost

Every design decision is made by someone who knows what it costs to build — so you get ambition where it's cheap and restraint where it isn't.

Built by who maintains it

A year from now, the person updating your site is the person who built it — not a stranger reverse-engineering someone else's work.

From clients

"Placeholder — a short client quote goes here, about what it was like to work with one person from first sketch to launch."

— Client name, Company · quote coming soon

Get a quote

Tell me about your project.

A few sentences is plenty — what your business does and what's slow, broken, or missing. I'll reply within one business day with questions and a rough sense of scope. Every project ends in a quote, not a menu price.

Prefer email? [email protected]

Reply within one business day. No newsletters, no follow-up sequence.