Six points to consider before changing your website design

Some tips from

If your website was designed some time ago, you may feel it is time for an updated design. This may be because you have realised from experience that your website's design is no longer optimum for your business. This article lists some general ideas you may want to consider when planning a redesign of your website, as suggested by Web Design Milton Keynes, Web Designers Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire Web Design, Website Design Bedford, Website Design Milton Keynes, Website Designers Milton Keynes, Web Design Buckinghamshire, Web Design Bedfordshire, and Web Design Bedford.

1. Make Sure That Your Reasons For Change Are Valid.
   Generally, regular visitors to your website won’t appreciate huge changes to the site design, because over time, they will have learnt how to navigate your website and have become comfortable with it; especially if there are no immediately recognisable benefits to the user for the changes.
   rnIf you decide it is necessary to do a website redesign Web Design Milton Keynes recommends trying to take steps to minimise the disruption to your regular users, for example by maintaining the position of the navigation elements of your site in the standard places. Although there are no hard and fast rules about where you must place these elements, putting them in the standard positions makes it easier for your visitors to move around your site.
   
   Some valid reasons for redesigning your website are:
   
   • To Make Your Website More User-Friendly
     Web Designers Milton Keynes say that redesigning your site to improve its user-friendliness is a valid reason for changing a site's design. In fact, changing the design in this instance will more than likely improve your regular visitor's experience rather than detract from it.
   • To Make Your Website More Accessible
     Alternatively, you may want to redesign your website to improve its accessibility. Buckinghamshire Web Design cites this as a good reason for modifying your site. Such a change will also make your website more search engine friendly.
   • To Make Your Website More Search-Engine Friendly
     Website Design Bedford gives another good reason for changing your website's design as a way to improve its search engine friendliness for SEO Milton Keynes and SEO Bedfordshire in particular, but also nationwide.



2. Minimize Changes to URLs
   Website Design Milton Keynes cautions when redesigning a website, many web designers feel that they should take the opportunity to sort out any poorly designed website structure that they or someone else had created earlier. For example, with experience they may have realised that your site can be more logically organised by putting certain files in a particular folder or you may want to rename your web pages so that they describe their contents more clearly.
   However, in most cases, states Website Designers Milton Keynes, changing URLs and website structure is not a good idea. When you move URLs, the reputation that your old page has established in the search engines is lost as the links pointing to it from other websites will be not be transferred to the new page unless you take special precautions.
   However, Web Design Buckinghamshire says if you feel that you have to move an old page. To minimize the moving issues, you will need to redirect all requests from the old page to the new. You need to indicate to the search engine and visitors that your old page has permanently changed location.



3. Make Site Appearance Changes by Modifying the CSS File Only
   Web Design Bedfordshire states that if you use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to manage the appearance of your site, and you merely want to change the sites appearance,it is possible to get away without a major reworking by modifying the CSS file instead. This type of change is simple to make since you are not required to go through every page on your site to modify it.



4. Get a Proper Web Editor
   To make site design changes much simpler it is worth investing in a good specification web editor advises Web Design Bedford, stating that this will provide you with the functionality to make site wide design changes. Commercial editors like Dreamweaver allow you to change your web design on a single "template" page and have all those changes automatically replicated across all the pages on your site that rely on that template.



5. Test the Impact of Changes to the Site Design
   Web Design Milton Keynes cautions that unless your site redesign is very minor, it's bound to have some sort of impact on your website. The redesign can increase or decrease the traffic flow through your site. You can monitor this through your sites web statistics. A good idea before you complete a site wide redesign is to test the implications of a redesign on only a few pages for a limited period of time and examine its impact on your statistics and income.



6. Back Up Your Site Before Changing Its Design
   Web Designers Milton Keynes cannot advise strongly enough that it is vital that you have an up-to-date backup of your existing website prior to changing its design. That way, if you find that your new design has undesirable side-effects, you can easily revert back to your old design.

Redesigning a website is a fact of life for many businesses and web designers like Buckinghamshire Web Designers. Bearing in mind the tips from this article may help you minimize the disruptions caused by a site design change.