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Silhouette placeholder. A photograph of Michael Schmidt will replace this. {{TODO: portrait photo from Michael — 2026-04-23}}
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03 · About

One operator, one research partner, a toolchain that makes the rest of it possible.

I'm Michael Schmidt. I run Michael Schmidt Media — a design, development, and marketing studio based in the Greater Cincinnati area. The studio is small on purpose: one operator, one research partner (Pamela), and a set of tools that let me ship like a ten-person shop without pretending to be one.

I've been building the web for about fifteen years. Before that I did other things that don't matter here, except to say I learned to hold long projects in my head and to keep showing up on the days it got boring. Shipping on deadline turns out to be the one skill every client actually wants.

Who actually does the work

I do. I write specs, I write code, I talk to clients, I push the button. Pamela handles research, fact-checking, and the project-management glue. When a job needs something outside our two sets of hands — heavy photography, a branding-first kickoff, a specialist motion designer — I hand you to a partner I trust. No invisible team, no agency-wide standups for your line item.

How the studio uses AI

Upstream, not as a feature. Claude and Claude Code are part of how I build: specs in, pull requests out, a disciplined commit cadence that makes it safe. For clients, I build AI integrations that actually save someone an hour a day — pricing assistants that read the real rate card, internal tools that sit on top of the Sheet of truth, content pipelines that turn transcripts into drafts. Never a chatbot bolted onto a brochure as a marketing gesture.

Craft vs speed

People treat this as a trade-off. It's one if you're mid, but the pattern that has worked for me is: craft is how you go faster. Typed APIs, a real design system, tests that matter, prompts in code instead of in a Google Doc. It feels slower the first week and pays off every week after that.

Work I turn down

Projects where the buyer wants a logo refresh and a feeling — I'm not a brand-first studio, and someone else will do it better. Projects where the team has already tried three agencies with the same brief and won't change the brief. Anything that requires me to lie about the timeline to close the deal. Life is short.

Who the studio is for

Small businesses that do something real in the world and want a site that reflects it. Founders who are tired of explaining the same thing to five different agencies. Teams that need an engineering partner who also thinks about copy and layout, so the handoff between design and build doesn't lose the thread. Cincinnati and the surrounding metros are home, but I work with clients anywhere that speaks English and sends invoices in USD.

Credentials, since you asked

  • 15+ years building on the web — agencies, small teams, solo.
  • Multiple client portfolios concurrently without the wheels falling off.
  • Fluent in the modern JavaScript stack (Next.js, React, TypeScript, Supabase), the AI stack (Anthropic, local models via Ollama), and the operations stack (Cloudflare, DigitalOcean, Cloudways).
  • Strong bias toward accessibility, performance, and real shipping.
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