The question of if you should redesign your website (or have it redesigned for you) pops into the head of anyone who owns a website, from time to time. A lot of people start out small and basic, especially when it comes to an ecommerce website. You either start out with little funding or time to get your site going so the appeal of the design can be lacking for many in the beginning.
A lot of others go the route of using a template or skin to start but that route can still be limiting and leave you with something down the road that you would like to have changed. Either way, you get your site live and functioning and as time goes on, when you have some success, you end up wanting to change the way it looks.
You often end up stumbling upon other websites where you see things you like about, as you browse the internet, and that sometimes can inspire the thought to throw away how your current site looks to create something like a site (or two) that you just saw. Other times you see a brand new website design pop up from a competitor and that can give you the urge to redesign your own site.
You do not always need to redesign your website, though you might think it is something very important to do. Your visitors have grown to know your current website the way it is and a lot of that can be part of the colors you use and your layout. Why change your site to look like Bob’s because he is a competitor and got a fresh makeover? Why not just do some small updates to certain elements of your current website, keeping a lot of the same colors you are currently using along with the same general layout? This gives some of the positive things that a complete redesign would give while maintaining a lot of the things that your users liked about your current site.
A complete website redesign can cost a lot of money and time. By updating small things, you can freshen up things a bit while keeping the cost and amount of time spent low. Perhaps you keep your background color and logo the same and keep the general layout. You might just freshen up that background color by slightly changing the tint of it or maybe adding some depth with a very subtle gradient of that color. The navigation can stay in the same location and maybe you slightly modify the way it looks, giving it more of a fresh and clean appearance…bringing it up to some of the new design standards of today.
Redesigning your website just because you want to or because another similar website did is not a good enough reason. You should only redesign your website to keep it aligned with branding changes (such as logo, colors, name, etc…), adding functionality (improving usability), or if your website is very much so not in alignment with more modern design trends which cause your site to look out of date (“that site is so ‘1995’”). Pairing great design with great usability can increase sales drastically and having a great website design is a very important thing. Just evaluate if it really needs to be changed completely or if you could just make some tweaks and changes here and there to bring up the appearance of it.
I have redesigned my personal website five times over the course of nine years. Most of the redesigns were done in the first few years because I recognized flaws in either the design itself or the usability. It was necessary for me to go through those growing pains and work out all the kinks. About four years ago I found myself making something that looked fantastic and was very usable but updating it was a nightmare because I made it too intricate in the back end. After that, I landed on something that was very clean, simple looking, and was easy to update. I have stuck with this general layout since then but just improved on the design over the years. I am constantly updating and adding things to the functionality and appearance month after month.
I visit a lot of websites daily and get to see a lot of fantastic looking ones. Many of them have the same objective as my own and because of that, I find myself almost craving to scrap what I have and to redesign mine to look like “this one” or “that one.” I really like the way my site looks and I have just been making subtle changes here and there. With all this Twitter craze, a subtle recent change has been just making graphical elements more prominent on my website that lead people to various social networking sites I am on.
The question that we as website owners need to ask ourselves is, does our website really need to be redesigned or do we just want to make it look like “Bob’s, over there at such and such company?” If your website already looks decent, is up to date with how things look these days, and is very usable, then why redesign it? Try to go the route of just implementing small things here and there to freshen up things a bit. You will save yourself time, money, and a lot of energy (and possibly many headaches).
Miva