Bellevue Restaurant Ascend Prime Has A New Easy To Use Website

Website Replatform for Bellevue Staple Ascend Prime

Ascend Prime provides not only some of Bellevue’s best views, but also top of the line gourmet cuisine. Ascend Prime Steak & Sushi provides Asian-influenced, contemporary steak, and sushi in a beautiful setting, 31 floors up. As a high-end restaurant, we know three things are crucial for their website: having access to their menu, a design that shows the ambiance of the restaurant, and the ability for them to easily update their site with menu changes, specials, and especially in light of COVID-19 - the changing hours of operation. 

The previous Ascend Prime website was designed to match their branding, using large scale photos and a dark, romantic feel. The thing is… Ascend Prime had an insanely difficult time updating their site and as a restaurant. With embedded video, parallax scrolling, and downloadable PDF menus, the site is not only beautiful but a relatively complex build for a restaurant. The previous development team decided to hard code every aspect of the website without a CMS - known as a Content Management System.

This site came due to our partnership with Seattle Times Media Solutions, who we happily partner with to provide web services to many of their amazing clients. The team at Seattle Times Media Solutions does a great job providing ongoing consultations, so when Ascend Prime noted frustrations with their old site, Seattle Times knew there was a better solution for them through their partnership with efelle. 

When Ascend Prime first came to us, we helped them make a few simple updates that took our developers an hour to dig into the messy code, that, with a CMS would have only taken minutes and would’ve been doable by the Ascend Prime team! With that in mind, they decided it was time to update their site. 

Design Changes and Updates

The first step was for our design team to recreate the original design, as well as make a few changes to optimize the design. As award-winning designers, we know when a design is doing its job, and the Ascend Prime site was designed beautifully and the team at Ascend was happy with it, so we decided just to recreate it. 

In terms of design, we optimized the navigation to show relevant topics, as well as simplified the design to keep the user on track to finding what they needed. Throughout the site, we also updated the shadowing and sizing of a few things to make sure they were optimized for accessibility as well as responsiveness. The final design change came when we created a single template for all the menus, a step to help create a cohesive user experience. 

Using a CMS to Simply Updates

As we mentioned, it’s really important for the Ascend team to be able to make updates to their site easily. Their menus are highly seasonal and change often, so they wanted the ability to make changes through the CMS. We used what is called a Matrix Module in FusionCMS to build out the custom menus, which allows them to add text, dietary icons, and more. 

The team at Ascend had a reservation system that worked well for them and their current POS system in the restaurants, so we were also able to seamlessly integrate that into the site. 

As restaurants begin to reopen and requirements change every day, the Ascend Prime team can now easily update their site quickly to inform customers of any changes. They’ve already pivoted and added Ascend at Home as an option to continue serving their customers their amazing food at home. 

Is Your Website Hard to Update? Not Sure Why?

Do you have questions about how your website could be improved or made easier to use? We’re happy to help point you in the right direction. Fill out the form below and one of our Digital Strategists will reach out for a free consultation.