Why complete re-designs are bad
January 16th, 2006 by Sonja DuijvesteijnIn the Netherlands we have a store called Hema. This store has a specific format they always use in their folders and commercials. And mainly includes big pictures with text over it and lots of white. When I find one of their folders on the doormat I’ll connect it with Hema instantly. Without even seeing the name, or looking at it specifically. And that alone will tell wether I’m interested in the content or not.
The same thing goes for sites. Whatever you do, you do not want to scare your visitors away. This visitor may have bookmarked your site, or for something like php.net, you come across it while you’re looking for information. When searching people do not always check the url where they’re going. Meaning there is no other way for your visitor of knowing that he is on your site other then the design and (less important) the logo.
When you do change your layout drastically your visitor feel will like he’s on a completely unknown site to him, instead of your site which has trustworthy information and will leave sooner. Just imagine you’d go to google and it suddenly looks like a portal such as yahoo. You’d be sure to check 3 times before you’re sure you’re at the right url.
No design changes then?
No complete re-designs doesn’t mean you can’t change the design at all. Small changes, one at a time can end up in a large changes over time. But without the downside of one big change. It also has an extra benefit. It makes the result of a change easier to track.
When you make a change to the navigation structure it might result in people getting lost, or the other way around, visitors finding exactly what they need. If you only change the navigation structure it’s easy to track the results of this change. When you do a complete overhaul in one go, there’s no telling what changes are good and which are bad.
Also, suppose you’re re-design went wrong, what are you going to do about it? Change back to the old design completely, or try and mend the bad design. With a small change that turns out badly it’s much easier to change things back, or tweak it until it does work.
Presenting re-design
Having said that, I hereby present my own complete re-design. My old design was, though interesting, hardly related to my targetgroup. Bright orange will happy red fish doesn’t exactly mean ‘webdevelopment’ to visitors at first site. I definately needed to change that. Also, the menu structure didn’t work out, and there was no place to leave archives, or space for popular reads as the site wasn’t at first meant as a blog. To me it was clear that there was hardly anything on the site that should stay as it was. But still, I could’ve done this one step at a time.
What made it clear to me I should do this in one go was the fact I only just started with blogging and don’t have many regular readers yet. As such, I thought it was better to change everything in one go, and tweak things later if necessary, then to present the would be frequent visitors with a bad design and a long list of apparent changes.
Related posts
CSS Reboot, webdesign trends
Cool use of css
Font-sizes in css: em ex px, mm cm in pt pc, %
URL rewriting with Apache's <tt>mod_rewrite</tt>
January 16th, 2006 at 11:23
Hmmm now you make me want to redesign my whole website properly :)
This post has inspiration written all over it :)
More!!! :D
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Greetings all…
So after nearly 5 years of focusing on the finance sector and really enjoying every minute of it…the time has come to expand my horizons and take the next step in delivering great products for Microsoft. So as of very soon (date TBD) I will be moving to a Program Management role in a new product being developed in the Office division.