7 AEC Website Design Mistakes (and How to Fix Them)

Here’s an uncomfortable truth I see every week: talented AEC firms losing pursuits—and losing people—to competitors who simply look bigger online. Not better. Bigger. Their work isn’t stronger, their teams aren’t deeper, but their websites make a prospect or a candidate believe they are.

Your website is the first interview, the first shortlist review, the first gut-check a client or recruit makes about your firm. And most AEC websites fail that test in the same predictable ways. Here are the seven mistakes I see most often, and what to do about each one.

1. Your Site Reads Like Every Competitor’s

Open your homepage next to three competitors’ sites. If you swapped the logos, could anyone tell them apart? “Full-service firm delivering innovative solutions with a commitment to excellence”—I could paste that sentence onto a thousand AEC websites and it would fit every one of them, which means it says nothing about yours.

Clients choosing between shortlisted firms aren’t looking for competence; they assume competence. They’re looking for a reason to pick you.

The fix: Lead with a positioning statement only your firm can claim. Name your market, your specialty, and the outcome you’re known for—“structural engineering for adaptive reuse in the Mountain West” beats “innovative solutions” every time. If a competitor could honestly put your headline on their site, keep rewriting until they can’t.

2. Your Proof Is Buried

Most AEC sites treat the portfolio like an appendix: a “Projects” link in the nav, three clicks deep, organized by internal department names no client uses. Meanwhile, the homepage spends its prime real estate on mission statements.

Your built work is the single most persuasive thing you own. Hiding it is like a courtroom lawyer keeping the evidence in the car.

The fix: Put signature projects on the homepage, above the fold if you can. Organize the portfolio by the markets your clients search—healthcare, K-12, multifamily—not by your org chart. And turn your best projects into short case stories: the challenge, your approach, the measurable result. A project photo with a square-footage caption isn’t proof; it’s inventory.

3. There Are No People on Your Website

AEC is a relationship business, but you’d never know it from most firm websites. No faces on the homepage, a leadership page with two headshots from 2014, and project pages that read like the buildings designed themselves.

Clients hire people. Candidates join people. When your site is all renderings and no humans, you’re hiding your most differentiating asset.

The fix: Show your team—real names, real faces, current photos. Put project leaders on the case studies they led. Let principals write or appear on camera with a point of view. A prospect who feels like they’ve already met your team walks into the interview half-sold.

4. Stock Photography Instead of Real Projects

Nothing undermines an AEC firm faster than stock imagery: the borrowed skyline, the staged hard-hat handshake, the glass conference room full of models pointing at blueprints. Your audience looks at buildings for a living. They can spot a stock photo in half a second, and what it tells them is that you don’t have real work worth showing—or you don’t care enough to show it.

The fix: Invest in professional photography of your actual projects and your actual people, on site. A day or two with a good architectural photographer will outperform years of stock subscriptions. If a page can’t be illustrated with your real work, that’s a signal about the page, not a reason to buy stock.

5. Unclear Calls to Action

I audit AEC websites where the only path forward is a “Contact” link hiding in the footer, leading to a generic form that goes to info@. You’ve done the hard work of earning a visit, and then you leave the visitor standing in the lobby with no receptionist.

Different visitors need different next steps. A developer vetting you for a pursuit, a journalist, and a project architect looking for her next role should not all be funneled into one anonymous form.

The fix: Give every key page one clear, specific next step. “Start a project conversation.” “See our healthcare work.” “Meet the team you’d work with.” Route inquiries to a named person with a face, and say what happens next—“You’ll hear from our principal within one business day” converts better than a submit button ever will.

6. Your Careers Content Is Invisible

The war for AEC talent is brutal, and yet most firms treat careers as a bulleted job list on a page nobody maintains. Meanwhile, the firm across town—the one that looks bigger—shows studio culture, growth paths, project variety, and real employees talking about why they stay. Guess who gets the candidate.

Every serious candidate visits your website before applying, and most decide whether to apply based on what they find.

The fix: Treat your careers section like a second homepage with its own audience. Show the studio, the site visits, the mentorship. Answer what candidates actually ask: What will I work on? Who will I learn from? What’s the path up? Employee voices—quotes, short videos—beat HR copy every time.

7. A Slow, Dated Platform

You can get every message right and still lose, because the site itself is the message. A homepage that takes eight seconds to load, breaks on a phone, or visibly dates to 2016 tells every visitor your firm is behind—and in an industry that sells precision and modern delivery, that’s fatal. It also quietly kills your search visibility, since speed and mobile experience are ranking factors.

The fix: Test your site today on your phone, on a cellular connection. If it’s slow, broken, or embarrassing, that’s your answer. Rebuild on a modern, fast platform your team can actually update, so news, projects, and people stay current without a developer on call. A website that’s easy to keep fresh stays fresh; one that isn’t will look dated again within a year.

Look as Good as Your Work

None of these fixes require a bigger firm—just a firm that presents itself as deliberately as it delivers projects. That’s the whole opportunity: most of your competitors are making these same seven mistakes, which means fixing them is how a mid-sized firm starts winning like a big one.

If you’d like a straight-shooting read on how your site stacks up, email us. We’ll tell you what we see—including the parts that are already working.

Josh Miles is the founder of Bold Brand, author of Bold Brand 2.0, and host of The Bold Brand Show. Bold Brand helps AEC firms attract top talent and win more work. Start a conversation →