The Golden Rule of Redesigning a Web site

When we redesign our Web sites what are we doing? Are we redesigning cause we want a fresh face to hope to gain more customers? Are we redesigning for better functionality, perhaps adding technologies that were missing when the site was first deployed? Or are we redesigning Web sites to reinvent ourselves?

The Internet is a service. It is not a product. If your order products through the Internet they don’t magically appear. Products come through some sort of delivery. When it comes to sites that have shopping carts for the selling of products you are given an interface that allows you to browse the inventory of the company. If you want product centricism, then go to a store so you can handle the products and see them work at their displays.

Web sites are a user interface no matter what the market or industry. Web sites give customers or audiences access to the information the company provides. Even if the company is hosting a solution such as Basecamp or Jamcracker’s large list of SaaS solutions these are all services.

When designing or redesigning your Web site you need to keep this in mind. Access and ease of use must be at the forefront, more so if it is a redesign. With a redesign, those who have previously visited your site are use to its charms or quirks and have grown accustomed to the look and feel.

When redesigning, keep your visitors in mind. One of the best ways in fact to get ideas about a redesign is to ask your visitors what do they not like about the site. This will give you a veritable playground of ideas that can aid you in enhancing the ease of use and might even decrease the amount of work you have to do. Do you visitors really want a product comparison tool? Do they want a means to interact with personal via live chat? Do they really want to hear about what goes on behind the scenes?

When redesigning you must also think about links to your old site. Will they still function? How will you deal with the influx of links that could go bad?

There are many ways to handle this. You could simply have them go to an error page stating that page no longer exists. This is the simplest way of handling and of course the worse. You could have a lookup table to match the incoming link with the new page. Which is good, but not the best. The proactive way would be to match up the link with a lookup table, have a quick page to notify the web master of that link to update their link to the new page, and even an email sent to the webmaster notifying them about the change of links. It will take a great deal of time, but will save on bandwidth and processor power over the long haul (depending on how popular your site is, etc).

Search engines need to be taking into account as well. Flash might look cool, but can be frustrating to visitors on low bandwidth connections or people like myself who have dozens of pages opened up at the same time. And flash sites are fun the first time, but I would rather have a normal HTML based page. They load up faster and give me instant access to the areas I want to browse. Whereas with Flash sites I have to wait for them to load, give me their cool animations, hunt for the area that mutes the page, etc. They can be an absolute pain. And search engine spiders cannot follow links in a Flash page so your SEO practices will be for naught.

When contemplating a redesign you need to know exactly why it is your are doing it. If you are doing it to liven up the colors and make the page look fresh then perhaps you should spend sometime making your site using CSS so that you can build fresh layouts for it. If you are redesigning it solely to increase your search engine traffic than make sure it doesn’t effect your current visitors in a bad way.

Unlike redesigning the box layout of a product, any attempts on changing the usability of your site should be run by your visitors. I may be sounding like a broken record, but it is the Golden Rule of Redesign.

Your visitors are your Web site’s life blood and without them what good will it be if you sink in thousands of dollars for a great looking site, but makes your current visitors turn to a competitor.