By Bianca Frank, Creative Director · Bianca Frank Design, Anchorage
Originally published October 2025. Rewritten and updated October 2026.
A nonprofit website usually has to do three or four jobs that a business site does one of: sell something, sign up members, take donations, and explain a mission to people who’ve never heard of it. Alaska Geographic’s did all four, and the old site had grown around them one addition at a time until none of the four was easy. This is what the project involved, where the time in a project like this actually goes, and what we’d tell the next nonprofit before it starts.
In short:
- Alaska Geographic needed one site to serve shoppers, members, donors, educators and park visitors, each arriving for a different reason.
- The structure came down to four paths from the home page: shop, membership and giving, education, and about. Everything else hangs off one of those.
- Most of the time in a nonprofit redesign isn’t design. It’s content, approvals and integrations, and planning for those is what keeps a timeline honest.
- The lesson for the next organization: settle who approves, who writes, and what systems must connect before the first design meeting.
Who Alaska Geographic is, and who the site is for
Alaska Geographic is the nonprofit partner to Alaska’s national parks and public lands. It runs the bookstores inside the park visitor centers, publishes maps, field guides and educational resources, and supports interpretation and education programs. Its revenue and its mission run through the same channels: a visitor buys a trail map, a teacher orders classroom materials, a member renews, a donor gives.
That means the website had five audiences on the first visit:
- Shoppers looking for a specific map or book, often from outside Alaska, often after a trip.
- Members renewing, checking benefits, or deciding whether to join.
- Donors who want to know what the money does and how to give.
- Educators looking for programs and materials.
- Park visitors and the curious trying to understand what the organization is and why it matters.
The old site had content for all five. It just didn’t have a path for any of them. The shop, the membership page, the programs and the mission were all present and all equally hard to find, and the design had accumulated rather than been decided.
The four paths
The structural decision that drove everything else was to give the home page four doors and make everything on the site live behind one of them:
- Shop: books, maps and guides, with the store integrated into the site rather than bolted on, so a visitor moves from a park page to the map for that park without leaving.
- Membership and giving: one place for joining, renewing and donating, with the benefits and the impact side by side.
- Education: programs and materials for teachers and learners, organized by what they’re for rather than by department.
- About: the mission, the partnership with the parks, the people.
Four paths is also the limit of what a visitor holds in mind on a phone. Anything that wanted to be a fifth top-level item had to justify why it wasn’t part of one of the four.
The visual side followed the same logic: the organization has strong photography of the places it serves, and the old site buried it under text. The new layout leads with the places and lets the text support them, with the branding carried consistently from the home page through the store and the membership pages so they read as one organization rather than three systems.
Where the time actually goes
In a nonprofit redesign at this scale, very little of the time is design. There are three slow parts, and a project with a store, a membership program and a board has all three.
Content. Hundreds of products, dozens of programs, years of pages. Deciding what to keep, what to merge, what to rewrite and who would write it takes longer than building the site that holds it. Nobody on a nonprofit staff has this as their only job.
Approvals. Boards meet on a schedule. Decisions about mission language, membership structure and what the home page says first go through people who meet monthly or quarterly, and a decision that misses a meeting waits for the next one. We build timelines around meeting dates now, and we still get surprised.
Integrations. The store, the membership system, the donation processing and the website each had their own vendor and their own rules, and they all had to work together and match. That’s where the technical time went: not in making pages, but in making systems agree.
None of this is wasted time. It’s the work. Naming all three at kickoff and planning for them is what makes a nonprofit’s calendar honest from the start.
What to settle before your nonprofit’s redesign starts
If you’re a nonprofit planning a redesign, these are the questions whose answers decide your timeline. Settle them before the first design meeting.
- Who approves what. Which decisions go to the board, which to the director, which to staff. Write it down with the meeting dates.
- Who writes. Name the person responsible for content, and give them the hours. If nobody has the hours, budget for a writer; it’s cheaper than a six-month stall.
- What systems must connect. List every platform the site has to talk to (store, membership, donations, email, events) and who administers each. Find out early which ones can’t do what you assume.
- Who the audiences are, and what each one comes to do. Four or five, named, with the one action each needs. That list becomes the navigation.
- Who owns everything. Domain, hosting, store, payment processor, admin logins, registered to the organization. Nonprofits with staff turnover get burned by this more than anyone.
- What “done” means. A launch date, a list of what’s in the first version and what comes after. A site that waits for every page to be perfect launches never.
Frequently asked questions
How long does a nonprofit website redesign take? For a small nonprofit with a simple site, three to four months. For an organization with an online store, membership system, donations and board approvals, a year or more is realistic, and most of that is content, approvals and integrations rather than design.
What should a nonprofit website include? A clear path for each audience (donors, members, program participants, the public), a mission explained for someone who’s never heard of you, easy giving and joining, current programs and events, and the people behind the organization. If you sell things, a store that feels like part of the site.
Why do nonprofit website projects run late? Content nobody has time to write, decisions that wait for the next board meeting, and systems that have to connect. Planning for all three at kickoff is the difference between a realistic timeline and an optimistic one.
Can a nonprofit website combine a store, memberships and donations? Yes, and it should, because the same visitor often does more than one. The work is in making the separate systems behind them agree with each other and look like one organization.
How much does a nonprofit website redesign cost? It depends on the number of systems involved and how much content has to be rewritten. We scope after a review of the current site and systems and quote the specific work, which is also how most grant budgets prefer it.
If your nonprofit is next
Start with the six questions above and write the answers on one page. That page is the beginning of a realistic scope. Send it to us and we’ll tell you what we’d expect the project to involve and how long it should actually take. Our website design work for nonprofits, tribal organizations and public agencies follows the same approach.
Bianca Frank is the founder and Creative Director of Bianca Frank Design, an Anchorage agency that has designed brands and websites for Alaska businesses since 2007. She holds a BFA in Graphic Design and leads a small in-house team covering branding, web design, SEO and content strategy, with recent work for clients including Nalaquq LLC, the Native Village of Barrow, Solstice Psychiatry and Alaska Geographic. BFD was named one of Anchorage’s best web designers by Three Best Rated (2025) and received UpCity’s Local Excellence and Best of Alaska awards (2022, 2023).
