The Mackinac Bridge lit at night, reflected in the Straits of Mackinac

Up At Last / Michigan U.P. & Arizona

We don’t replace what you run. We connect it.

Most businesses don’t need new software. They need the software they already bought to stop working in separate rooms. That’s the job we do — and we do it in code, not slide decks.

Start a project Firearms & restricted retail

00 — Why the bridge

The Mackinac bridge didn’t replace Michigan’s peninsulas. It replaced the ferry.

Before 1957 the only way across the 5 miles of water between Michigan’s Upper and Lower peninsulas was the state car ferry. Come deer season the line at Mackinaw City ran for hours. Both peninsulas were fine. The crossing was the problem.

That’s the part we take out. Not your point of sale, not your website, not the email platform someone set up years ago — the ferry. The re-keying. The CSV export. The person who retypes web orders into the register every Monday morning.

Your POSalready there

Your sitealready there

Your CRMalready there

Your booksalready there

We build the deck they all sit on.

Before the bridge

Cars queued at the Mackinaw City ferry dock waiting for the state car ferry — The queue
Mackinaw City

General plans for the Mackinac Bridge and Causeway, Charles E. Fowler, November 1933 — The plan
Fowler, 1933

The Michigan State Ferry City of Cheboygan loading cars at the Straits — State ferry
City of Cheboygan

01 — What we do

Design. Host. Support.

One shop, one number to call. We build the site, we run the server it lives on, and we’re the ones who pick up when something breaks at 4pm on a Friday.

Build & integrate

Custom WordPress and WooCommerce, plus the connective work that makes your existing systems talk to it — inventory feeds, order sync, customer records, catalog imports. Written properly, not held together with a plugin and hope.

Managed hosting

Our own servers, not a reseller badge on someone else’s dashboard. SSL, daily backups, staging, and updates handled — so the platform your business runs on isn’t a thing you have to think about.

Ongoing support

You get a person, not a ticket queue. We already know your setup, because we built it — which is the difference between a fix in an hour and a fix in a week.

The Mackinac Bridge and an American flag from the water

02 — Firearms & restricted retail

The hard category. On purpose.

Selling firearms online means working against your own tools. The ad platforms restrict the category. Every distributor sends its catalog in a different shape. And age gating, state-by-state shipping rules and FFL transfers have to be right every single time, on every single order.

So most shops end up running a stack nobody planned: a website from one vendor, a register from another, a distributor plugin from a third, and no two of them agreeing about what is in stock. That is not anyone’s mistake. The tools arrived one at a time, over years, each one solving the problem in front of you.

We took this category on purpose. Plenty of agencies will build a firearms retailer a good-looking website. Far fewer will wire it to the register, normalize nine distributor feeds and keep the compliance rules in step — and that is the part that decides whether the website is worth having.

Steamboat Springs, Colorado

Elk River Guns & Elk River Sports

Axis POSWordPressWooCommerceFFL CockpitOtterTextFluentCRM

Two sites, one operation — and that’s the strategy. Elk River Guns is the FFL. Elk River Sports is the clean, non-SHAFT storefront that can advertise in the places the gun site can’t, and it funnels straight back to the same counter.

Behind both: Axis runs the register. FFL Cockpit runs distribution — nine distributors in, plus catalog product feeds back out to the aggregator sites. Six tools, five vendors, and all of it has to agree with the storefronts in real time. We built and maintain the connections that keep them telling the same story.

elkriverguns.com

Long Island, New York

Long Island Gun Source

CoreStoreCoreForceCoreILLA

A custom storefront on top of CoreForce. They run the Coreware stack end to end — CoreStore at the counter, CoreForce online, CoreILLA for marketing.

Our work is the front of it: a storefront built on CoreForce that looks like their shop instead of a template, with category and product pages laid out for how people actually shop firearms. We didn’t ask them to leave Coreware. We made the part customers see worth looking at.

ligunsource.com

Holtsville, New York / With IBEW Local 1049

NY Gun Shows

BricksAutomatic.cssPerfmattersRank Math

Long Island’s biggest gun show, run with the IBEW Local 1049 Sports & Outdoors Committee. It used to trade as Empire State Gun Shows, and the rebrand needed a site that answers what, where and when before you have finished scrolling.

Dates, admission and the vendor table rate sit at the top, because that is what people come for. Underneath it, a coupon signup builds the mailing list that fills the next show — the job a promoter actually needs a website to do.

nygunshows.com

What that actually takes

Listing where it’s hard

SHAFT categories get flagged and throttled. We know what the ad platforms accept, and when the answer is a second, cleaner storefront.

Distribution, both directions

Nine distributor catalogs in, feeds back out to the aggregators — that’s FFL Cockpit on the Elk River build, normalizing whatever arrives.

Counter to web

What sold in the store five minutes ago shouldn’t still be for sale online. POS and storefront in sync, the direction your business runs.

Search that finds it

Caliber, capacity, action, finish, and the name their buddy told them. Filtering built around how this category is really shopped.

Compliance in the loop

Age gating, state-by-state shipping rules and FFL transfer flow wired into the storefront, in step with whatever runs your bound book.

Certified where it counts

WordPress, WooCommerce, FluentCRM, Microsoft, Google and ActiveCampaign certifications — the level where hard integrations get solved.

To be straight about what we are: we write the code, not the copy. We’re not a marketing agency and we don’t produce your content — we work alongside whoever does. What we bring is making sure the message they write can actually get listed, sent and tracked in a category where most platforms say no.

03 — Recent work

Built for real businesses.

A flatbed carrier in Illinois and a science teacher with a storefront have nothing in common except this: neither of them wanted a website. They wanted the thing the website does.

Jerseyville, Illinois / Family owned since 1948

Hansen Trucking

WordPressQuote intakeDriver recruitingManaged hosting

The site has two jobs: land freight and hire drivers. Flatbed, grain and oversize, with lanes from the Midwest to the coasts — so the quote form has to ask the right things and land in dispatch’s hands quickly.

The other half is recruiting. A driver deciding where to apply looks at the equipment, the safety record and whether anyone picks up the phone. The site puts all three in front of them instead of burying it.

hansentrucking.com

Park Rapids, Minnesota / Mobile diesel repair

Straight River Diesel

WordPressRoadside intakeFluent FormsManaged hosting

One page, one job: get the truck moving. Road service and shop repair, 24/7. Whoever is reading it is usually stopped on a shoulder somewhere, so the phone number comes before the sales pitch and the service request asks whether it’s roadside before it asks anything else.

The answer goes to the shop and a confirmation goes back to the driver, which had never happened before. 100 out of 100 on Lighthouse, mobile and desktop — which is the difference between loading and not loading on one bar of signal.

straightriverdiesel.com

Jerseyville, Illinois / Embroidery since 1985

S.S. Hansen Embroidery

WordPressWooCommerceEmployee storeAllowance vouchersManaged hosting

A public site out front and an employee store behind a password. Crews sign in, spend a clothing allowance instead of a card, and ship to their own yard — so the store has to know who they are, what they have left, and which addresses it is allowed to send to.

Vouchers, an approved-locations shipping list and a free-shipping window that opens on a schedule. Behind it, 160-odd garments matched back to the distributor catalogs they come from, so the photo and the sizes on the page are the ones that actually turn up.

sshansenembroidery.com

Education / Direct storefront

Bright in the Middle

WordPressWooCommerceMembershipsDigital delivery

Off the marketplace, onto her own storefront. Middle-school science resources that used to sell through a third party now sell direct — same work, and she keeps the margin instead of the platform.

Instant digital delivery, membership access and an email list that’s actually hers. The hard part of moving off a marketplace isn’t the store; it’s not losing the customers on the way across.

brightinthemiddle.com

First grade literacy / Subscription storefront

Literacy Stations

WordPressWooCommerceSubscriptionsDigital delivery

A library, not a shop. The Library Card is one payment for twelve months of everything — so the storefront has to sell access rather than items, and then keep serving it every time a teacher comes back for the next unit.

Renewals, entitlements and instant delivery all have to agree with each other, and none of it can involve anybody packing a box. Six hundred-odd resources, and the store has to know which ones each teacher is entitled to today.

literacystations.com

First grade literacy / The front door

Teaching Firsties

WordPressArticlesFree resourcesEmail capture

The same split as Elk River, in a different industry. Teaching Firsties gives first grade teachers articles and free printables. Literacy Stations is where they buy. Two sites, one operation, and the traffic runs one way on purpose.

The work is the handoff: somebody who arrived for a free download has to land somewhere that already knows what they teach, with the list built quietly along the way.

teachingfirsties.com

04 — Who it’s for

Everybody drives across it. Somebody has to keep it standing.

Nobody crossing the bridge thinks about the cable, the paint crew or the anchorage. That’s the point — and it’s the deal we make with the businesses we work for.

Firearms retailers carrying a stack of software that never quite agreed with itself.
Shops and makers selling online who need it to just work, every day, without a meeting.
Teachers and creators with something to sell and no interest in becoming a developer.
Anyone who has been handed off between four agencies and would like to stop.

We’re small on purpose. You get the person who wrote the code — and we only take on work we can actually do well.

A Mackinac Bridge tower seen from the deck

05 — How it goes

Three steps. No runaround.

Step 01

We look at what you have

Every system you’re running, including the ones you’re embarrassed about. There’s no judgment here — a working mess that pays the bills beats a clean rebuild that doesn’t.

Step 02

We tell you what’s worth doing

Plainly, in order, with what it costs. Sometimes the answer is that you don’t need us for that part. We’d rather say so than sell it.

Step 03

We build it and we stay

The site goes live on our hosting and we keep running it. You call a person who already knows your setup, because that person built it.

Driving across the Mackinac Bridge, both towers ahead

Once it’s built, you just drive across it.

06 — Start here

Tell us what you’re running.

Send the list — every tool, however ugly. We’ll tell you what can be connected, what should be replaced, and what to leave alone. Reply inside one business day.

Prefer email? hello@upatlast.com · Michigan U.P. & Arizona · clients everywhere