The Tendo View

My latest hobby is beekeeping, and I’m fascinated by what I’m learning. Bees are amazing creatures. A hive holds about 60,000 bees: one queen, 50-something-thousand worker bees, and a couple hundred drones (male bees whose sole purpose in life is to mate with the queen; I’ll hold back on the sexist comments). There is such clarity of purpose and efficiency in a beehive, and every time I see a comb I marvel at its perfection.

One thing about bees is that they rely on their hive being in one location. Move the hive too suddenly or too far, and they won’t come home—they’ll just keeping going back to where the hive used to be. So the way to move a hive is to move it a couple inches every day until you have it at its new location.

I think Web audiences are a lot like bees. I’ve managed lots of redesigns in my publishing career, and every time new designs launch, mailboxes flood with angry readers saying they liked everything better the way it used to be.  Sometimes a planned series of design “phases” or iterations will be less disruptive to the audience than a wholesale abrupt change, especially when a redesign is not serving as a brand refresh necessarily but more of a reconfiguration.

The redesigns I’ve managed that launched as entirely different publications/sites—with new sections, old sections in new places, all new type treatments, etc.—did so because a refresh of the publication and audience was in order. Sometimes you change your brand because you need it to appeal to a specific/different customer segment. Other times, you change it because you want to reach more customers and offer more value, without losing any one customer segment. That’s when we could take a lesson from bees.

Email me or follow me on Twitter at @cziems and I’ll give you some of my first batch of honey.