There are many discussions going on at the moment, on the subject of whether it is better to Redesign your old site from scratch or adopt a strategy of making seemingly small visual changes throughout the design of your site. This article from one of my regular reads on a list apart is totally bias towards this approach. Over on Web Designer Depot they have a much more level headed approach and rather than dismissing the Redesign approach, they explain exactly what is involved in each process.
This second view is far less superficial as the first article sounds like it came from someone who is not involved in the code behind the site, which is where the real WEB part of the term Web Design comes into play. When a visual design is put together by someone who doesn’t code, there will be no mention of build. The time it takes a visual designer to make slight adjustments visually is not in any way linked to the time it would take to ‘adjust’ the actual Web site. The visual elements may look similar, however, if the layout of the site has been changed, it will more often than not, take the same amount of time to rebuild the page as any Redesign would take. Changes to column widths, from flat navigation to addition of dropdown navigation require significant changes to the underlying technology that makes the site work. Elements of a page are often dependant on those elements around them and as a result the surrounding elements usually require major rethinking. This can often lead to a complete rebuild of the page to achieve the new, seemingly superficial changes.
So what is actually involved?
When redesigning a site you basically start from scratch which means that you can adopt all of your tried and tested skills as an experienced professional designer, to come up with an approach which you truly believe will work for that client both now and into the future. Anyone with experience of modern design will have quite a few tools up their sleeve to start on the new page rather than working around old code. If you are ‘adjusting’ work done four years ago by someone else who may not have the experience required to create a professional Web site, in my experience you are working with old, outdated and badly written code on which you have to perform numerous hacks and workarounds to, for instance, change the navigation so that it is a bar that runs along the top as opposed to having it off to the left.
When designers talk about the adjustment process, or realigning, being somehow cheaper than redesigning it will usually mean that they are being led by a flat design with no thought behind what real adjustments are going to be made to the code and how long those will realistically take. Putting two similar designs side by side and telling a client that one is a ‘realignment’ of the other (as in the list apart article) is leading the discussion on purely visual grounds, not once mentioning how this is going to translate to every modern browser that todays Industry demands. Any visual that a designer produces in photoshop is all it is going to be until the designer who has embraced the technology to make that into something tangible, clickable and attractive to use, is hired to bring it to life. Tagging something with the term realignment doesn’t automatically mean that to achieve something seemingly minor on a visual, will take a small amount of time. As anyone in business knows, time is money.
WYGIWYS, see what I mean?
Realignment isn’t always a cheaper process, it is simply a different one involving differing amounts of work in different areas and care should be taken if suggesting anything otherwise.
From experience of building many Front Ends and becoming a better and better visual designer of modern XHTML, I believe that there are too many factors involved in the design and build of a Web site to be able to confidently say ‘we can realign that for you’ without at least finding out a bit about the existing site first. Here are some important considerations to think about before adopting the realignment process:
- How old is the current site? If it is more than around 3 Years old, the technology behind it is probably out of date and it would be more cost effective to rebuild from scratch, bring the sites code up to date, making it more future proof.
- How well does the current site perform? If a site is slow, it is not always because the server it sits on is slow. The way the site is built often has a bearing on speed. Realiging will not solve these fundemental accessibility issues.
- What do your CUSTOMERS want? If you are simply tired of your current design, you often just want a bit of a spruce up, do your customers want the same as you? The old adage ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ was made for this situation. Changing a perfectly well performing site could damage your business if your USERS are put off by something that is unfamiliar to what they have grown acustomed to. Consider adopting a feedback strategy instead to gauge the mood of your users before making drastic changes.
