3 Approaches To Updating Your Web Design

If your website is approaching its fifth or sixth birthday it may be time to assess your web design and see whether it is still working for you and your users. It’s likely that you will find a brand new design is needed in order to update your website. There are, however, three ways that you can tackle updating your design– what are they and which approach is best suited to your website?

The “big bang” approach

This approach involves a change from your old web design to a brand new website all in one go.

The good thing about taking this approach is that it will keep your website looking consistent – one day, your website will be its old and boring self and the next, it will have a brand spanking new web design. This approach is also highly beneficial in keeping your analytics clean – changing the entire design over at once will allow your design team to measure and test the new website more efficiently.

A significant disadvantage of the big bang web design change over approach, however, is that it can take a long time to implement, as you will need to wait until the entire new website is complete before going live. You also pose the risk of disheartening your regular visitors who will have to learn how to navigate your new design – this may deter them from visiting your website as often.

The “bit by bit” approach

This approach involves implementing aspects of your new web design over a period of time, generally section by section.

This makes the implementation of the new web design a much easier task to tackle. If you have a large or content rich website, being able to change over each section gradually will make the process run that much smoother and allow time to adjust the code where needed. This also allows you to gently ease your regular website visitors into your new design.

One of the bad aspects of this web design approach, however, is that it can prove to be a highly complex process. Extensive testing and maintenance will be required to ensure that the website remains functional and user friendly whilst the updates are being implemented.

The “evolution” approach

This approach involves a complete avoidance of a new web design and focuses on simply improving the current website.

The good thing about this approach is that it saves time in coming up with a new design and with the measuring and testing that comes with it. As an entire website redesign will take up a lot of valuable time, just tweaking and adjusting the elements of your existing design will give your team more time to work on other important projects.

The main disadvantage associated with this approach, however, is that there is only so much you can do to an outdated web design before you have to start it all over again. Having the same or similar design forever really does not display much in the way of progress for your business, and it can begin to appear boring and even more outdated.

If your website is growing dangerously close to becoming outdated (or has already crossed this line) you should be looking towards one of the above approaches to drastically improve your web design. Whichever approach you use, however, will depend on the manpower at your fingertips and how you feel your users would best embrace your new design.