Your Website is a Tool, Not a Trophy Case

We recently redesigned beekeepergroup.com from the ground up. In an agency where that’s one of our core services, it’s a double-edged sword: either a great opportunity to practice what we preach, or a very public place to fall short. We’re proud to say it was the former.

In our recent Ask Bee Anything session, we pulled back the curtain on the process, the decisions, and the principles that guided us. This process has historically taken a long time (around 18 months at a minimum): when your clients are always the priority (as they should be), your own website tends to sit on the back burner. This time, we made a deliberate effort to hold ourselves accountable and apply new techniques that allowed us to move from kickoff to launch in six months. The process below is a big part of why that was possible.

If you missed the session or want to check out any of what was covered, you can access it here.

The first thing we did was resist the temptation to skip the fundamentals. Even for our own project, we started with a Brainswarm — the same collaborative process we run with clients. We opened a FigJam board to the entire staff and used three structured prompts to surface pain points, wish list items, and big-picture goals. That input got synthesized into user stories, which became the guiding principles for every design and development decision that followed.

If you haven’t written user stories before, the format is simple: “As a _______, I want to _______.” It sounds almost too simple, but that structure does something important. It strips out the tech jargon and forces you to articulate the “why” before you decide on the “how.” For us, that meant surfacing things like: as a marketing manager, I don’t want to have to learn HTML to post something to our website. That one insight led to decisions about how we structured the backend that made our team’s lives meaningfully easier.

We went in with four big-picture principles:

1. Showcase our work and people prominently;
2. Make the site work well for AEO, GEO, and SEO;
3. Minimize backend friction for staff; and
4. Bring some unmistakable Beekeeper Group flavor.

One of the most common mistakes we see on organizational websites is treating the navigation like a table of contents – trying to list everything so visitors can find anything. The problem with that logic is a UX principle called Hick’s Law: decision-making time increases the more options you present. More choices don’t create clarity. They create paralysis.

Our old site leaned heavily on anchor links from the homepage, which worked at a certain scale but wasn’t giving visitors a clear path forward. For the redesign, we aimed for no more than four to six top-level navigation items, with thoughtful use of dropdowns rather than trying to surface every page. We also made sure that the footer, breadcrumbs, and sidebar elements were doing real work by directing users in ways that felt natural without cluttering the primary navigation.

For advocacy organizations in particular, this matters beyond aesthetics. Cleaner navigation means clearer calls to action, which means better advocacy impact. The fewer decisions someone has to make to find what they need, the more likely they are to actually get there.

At Beekeeper Group, nothing makes us more proud than the work we do for clients. But as much as we wanted the new case study section to shine, we knew we had a problem that a lot of organizations face: it’s genuinely hard to find time to sit down and write up a case study in the middle of client work.

So we designed the internal submission process first. We took our own UX advice and made the form as simple as possible. The result is a repeatable format that gives our team enough flexibility to tell different kinds of stories while keeping the output consistent and visually cohesive. We also built a categorization system that makes it easy to filter by service or industry.

The visual design went through several rounds — from rough sketches to wireframes to final comps — and we didn’t stop iterating until it felt right. But none of that would matter if the backend process didn’t make it easy for our team to actually keep it populated.

A website should feel like your organization, not like a template that could belong to anyone. Our clients already know that Beekeeper Group works a little differently than other public affairs agencies. For us, that meant leaning into the more playful, direct, and opinionated voice that defines how we show up with clients. The bee flight path, the abstract page headers, the bold typography – those aren’t decorations. They’re expressions of who we are.

We also made a deliberate choice to put faces and voices front and center. Staff POV videos, thought leadership posts attributed to real people, photos that go beyond a headshot-and-bio page – these are the things that give visitors a sense of the actual humans behind the work. For advocacy organizations, the same principle applies: story collection from advocates, members, and community voices makes your message feel real in a way that polished copy alone never can. One thing worth noting: the redesign also surfaced some gaps in our brand elements that we hadn’t noticed until we had to apply them consistently at scale. We used the site project as an opportunity for a light brand refresh in parallel. If you’re planning a redesign, it’s worth asking whether your brand system is actually ready to hold up across a full website. If you think it might be time,drop us a line – we’d be more than happy to help bring those goals to life.

This was probably the piece of the session that generated the most conversation. Human website traffic is declining. Not because people are less interested in your issues, but because the way people search for and consume information is changing at an extremely fast pace. AI tools are increasingly answering questions before anyone ever clicks through to a website.

That means designing for SEO alone is no longer enough. We think about three layers now:

1. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization): We built FAQ blocks into many pages across the site. If you give an answer engine the answer directly, it doesn’t have to infer it – which means it’s more likely to serve your content accurately and cite it as a source.
2. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): Our copy is intentionally brief, punchy, and written in an executive summary voice. If your content is already summarized, AI doesn’t have to summarize it for you – and what it says about you is more likely to reflect what you actually want to say.
3. SEO: Classic SEO best practices still matter, and we kept them. Well-structured content, clear headings, descriptive metadata – none of that goes away.

For advocacy organizations, the implication is direct: think about how a legislative staffer or a potential advocate is going to look for information about your issue. They may be asking an AI assistant, not searching Google. Put yourself in their shoes and make sure you’re feeding the answers you want into the ecosystem.

A website project is easy to treat as a one-time deliverable. You build it, launch it, move on. What we’ve come to believe is that the most valuable websites are designed as tools with ongoing utility, both for the people who visit them and for the teams who maintain them.

Start with user stories. Do the brainstorm (or Brainswarm, patent pending) with your stakeholders. Think about navigation as subtraction. Build an internal process that makes content creation sustainable. And start thinking about how your content reads to an AI, not just a human.We’d love to talk through your goals. If you want to learn more about our process and how it can help achieve your advocacy goals, drop us a line!