About

A Milwaukee WebOps practice.

Built for people who want their systems to make sense. Artisan is a Milwaukee design, development and operations practice: we make websites and brands, and we run the infrastructure they live on, deliberately, as one thing.

WebOps just means we don’t treat design, development and hosting as three separate businesses. If you’ve heard us use the word at a meetup, that’s all it is: one team writing the code, deploying it and keeping it running, so there’s no handoff where the story changes.

Why we exist

Most small businesses end up with two vendors: someone who built the site, and someone who hosts it. That’s fine right up until something breaks, at which point each one can credibly say it’s the other’s problem, and the person who actually loses is the one paying both invoices.

We used to think of this as two different businesses too, a studio and a hosting company. It has always been one team. Now the name says so.

Server rack in our Milwaukee facility

How we work

Write it down

Every stage of an engagement ends with a document. Environments are named and versioned so “what changed?” is a question with an answer rather than a mystery.

Own the boundary

We state what we manage and what you manage, in writing, before work starts. Grey areas get discovered at the worst possible moment.

Prefer boring

Debian, systemd, hand-written CSS, self-hosted fonts. Novelty is a cost, and it gets paid by whoever maintains the thing in three years.

Be reachable

A person replies within one to two business days, and immediately when something is actually down. There is no tier-one queue.

Local, and connected

We’re in Milwaukee and active in the development community here. That matters for clients who want someone they can actually meet, and it doesn’t stop us working remotely, which most of our embedded work is.

Security is a partnership too: our infrastructure is reviewed with Maka Security Solutions, who are also a client. That cuts both ways, which is how we like it.

We handle it so completely you forget you have to think about your website.