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Website Redesign Roundup
Lots of talk about redesigning websites lately. Maybe it’s because summer is ending, and the Holidays are right around the corner (for e-Tailers, that is)?
First, there was Jeff Sexton’s post about asking the right Persuasion Architecture questions before redesigning, which was inspired by a Seth Godin post. Then, Jakob Nielson had some good thoughts from the Usability camp about redesigns and how radical they should be.
Mr. Nielson’s thoughts resonated with me given that our OnTarget product is generally focused on incremental improvement of clients’ existing websites. He urges readers to avoid redesigns that involve massive change to a site’s user interface. Why? Because users (read: customers and prospects) hate change and love the familiar, even if we as marketers are sick of how our own sites look. It’s always good advice to “evolve a UI with gentle changes rather than offer a totally fresh design.” He also recommends “getting the basic design right in the first place, before you launch, so that it can live several years with minor updates.” I think that’s a key point: a good (re)design is one that can stay fresh and current for several years, and accommodate a process of continuous improvement and incremental change.
I’ve seen many gorgeous site redesigns that didn’t stand up to that criteria–they weren’t well-coded, well-documented, or maintainable. And when it came time to start optimizing, the marketing team found many unexpected constraints that made incremental changes more expensive than they bargained for.
Another point I’d like to drive home is that redesigns should be done with ROI in mind, not because internal stakeholders are sick of the look and feel. There should be documented goals that can be measured, for example, increasing pages per visit by 20%, and increasing conversion rate by 5%. And flexibility should be built in, so that you can always have a “to do list” of small improvements you can implement each month to incrementally build on your successes.
Finally, if you are considering a moderate to major redesign, keep in mind that usability testing can be done on very simple prototypes before you make major investments. And, we love giving feedback on mockups, wireframes, prototypes, etc. because it allows our clients to launch with the best possible product, after which we start the process of continuous improvement.
About the author
Brendan Regan is a Senior Persuasion Analyst. Prior to joining FutureNow, he worked in B2C online travel and B2B marketing. He likes to grok web design, user experience, and persuasive copywriting.
More articles from Brendan Regan
- Nobody wants to read your sh**!September 21st, 2009
- Redesign? Ask The Right Questions!September 18th, 2009
- Cross-post: How to Improve a Product Page, Part 1September 15th, 2009
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September 23rd, 2009
12:50 pm
Hi Brendan,
I’ve seen that as you pointed out, its very important to keep RIO in mind over what you may think works. A good example is to perform a test against 2-3 different call to action buttons. There have been reports out of several large websites that increased their conversion rates dramatically by just changing the color and/or wording of their buttons. It’s incredible the little things you can do to tweak it. Good article!
September 23rd, 2009
1:49 pm
Hi Brendan,
Great article. I agree. We’ve had dozens of client experiences where they will come to us and ask for a full re-design, and often won’t need one at all. They simply need some enhanced usability testing to indicate problem points on the website, with respect to conversion. Once we identify those, we can test new solutions to enhance conversion rate, and ultimately improve the ROI.
September 23rd, 2009
3:57 pm
I stumbled across this article and find it very useful! As long as a site is cleanly built to begin with, minor updates are easy to incorporate and fairly easy to measure.
As long as you have good content and your site is usable, people expect it to stay that way. Don’t mess things up just because you want a fresh look. However, if you are receiving minimal results from your website, it may be time for a bigger redesign.
Thanks for sharing!
Andrea
@ProtoShare
September 23rd, 2009
4:26 pm
Good points. However, as hinted at above, it depends how bad the current design is. Sometimes a huge overhaul is necessary.
September 23rd, 2009
6:06 pm
Thanks for sharing this information. Redesigned website also needs more regression testing to make sure changes have not affected other functionalities of website.
September 23rd, 2009
6:50 pm
Good post, thanks Brendan.
I have an issue / question with the goal setting section though. How on earth can any company say ‘we want to increase sales by 20%’? Isn’t that just a stupid thing to say. It might be that no design could do that, it might be that a good design could improve the rate by 40%, how can any company make concrete decisions based on target numbers plucked out of the air?
September 23rd, 2009
7:00 pm
@Ian: While I’m not in favor of unrealistic redesign goals (C-level executives are often guilty of this), we strongly believe a redesign should have documented goals.
Goals should be based in reality, i.e. if the industry-standard conversion rate is 2%, then don’t expect a redesign to give you 50% conversion rate right away.
If you don’t hit your redesign target, you learn something from it. If you do hit your redesign target, you ask for a raise
September 23rd, 2009
7:16 pm
@Brendan
Good point… but I think there’s still a key problem with saying ‘this arbitrary level is good, that one is bad’. I want my marketing efforts to get 100% of what we’re capable of getting (with the resources we have). I certainly don’t want the marketing team getting a raise if they hit an easy 20% goal, in fact maybe they should get the sack for aiming so low. But if they get a 2% improvement in a site that’s already optimized up the alleyoop… hey, great stuff.
In my experience these kinds of improvements are like business plans. They never come out exactly how you thought they would: stuff you thought would be easy is excruciating, and other bits that were just ‘duh’ moments win you 80% of the improvements you achieved.
But I do take your point that you can set levels of the type: ‘we have to get conversion levels us to about that of our competitors, otherwise we’ll continue to lose market share’.
Great and thought provoking post. I’ve only found the blog pretty recently and am enjoying the back-log greatly.
September 24th, 2009
1:17 am
We are slowly making changes to our site and have seen an increase in conversion rates.
This takes time and effort though. Thanks for the insights.
September 24th, 2009
2:22 am
Great post !…thanks for share with us.. :d
September 24th, 2009
2:28 am
Nice arctilce. A major redesign should made carefully in dependence on the corporate identity of clients.
September 24th, 2009
8:10 am
nice. article….thanks i kept in mind…
September 24th, 2009
4:06 pm
Our industries love of website redesigns is absolutely insane. When a redesign is necessary, you’re basically saying you have failed to discover problems and optimize the site properly.
September 24th, 2009
10:45 pm
great articles, only its gonna be more pain in the ass
i was thinking about redesins my web lately
September 25th, 2009
12:03 pm
Hi Brendan,
Thanks so much for this blog post. It’s a difficult decision as to whether to redesign a site when it is may be best to leave well enough alone or just implement minor tweaks. Moreover, the look of the site may remain consistent but the coding may have to be cleaned up.
Your notion of ROI as an extremely important criterion when weighing the “redesign or not question” is well taken. I group this with SEO as it may go hand in hand with future profitability. (Webmasters may very well be concerned with redesign as it will definitely alter standing with the search engines — hopefully, improving a given site’s visibility in time.
The site’s organization, navigation, ease of use for the visitor, code, marketing, and aesthetics have to be factored in when weighing the prospect to alter a site. Of course, all these considerations can lead to uncertainty and immobilization and that’s why so many webmasters choose to maintain the status quo and only implement minor changes. (Then again, after 8 years, our site has been altered 4 times.
)
September 27th, 2009
7:16 am
I never thought of it that way. I keep redesigning my sites because I get bored looking at it everyday. But if I create content with my visitors in mind, I should do the same with my redesigns and do just small steps. Thank you!
September 27th, 2009
2:53 pm
Getting the evaluation of any site amendment is useful for site owners as they can see the improvment the change was, then ultimately improving the effectiveness of any future changes. This way a site can be refined to what the users want. This way of streamlining a web process is highly effective.
September 28th, 2009
5:52 am
In my opinion I line fast homepage with simple code. With is easy to use and renders really fast.
I know some site owner who invested 50 grands in new homepage, but there is nothing WOW even rendering speed is bad. So as author said. Keep in mind ROI
September 28th, 2009
1:13 pm
“Because users (read: customers and prospects) hate change and love the familiar”
Totally agree….It is much better to ease them into it. Users go into freak out mode with any major changes.
September 28th, 2009
1:33 pm
I’ve seen al ot of redesigns in the past on several high quality sites like Shoemoney. I guess i’m one of those that really hate change, but he seems to do a good job of keeping most of the sites functionality the same. I think it is important, unless it is absolutely needed, to leave things in the same general area. So for example, if you are running a two column and have loyal readers, keep a two column layout in a redesign unless you just absolutely have to change it.
September 28th, 2009
1:42 pm
Hello Brendan,
Just wanted to thank you for sharing this information about redisigning a website. i really think it is an important matter and that website needs new look from time to time.
September 28th, 2009
3:06 pm
I think that what you’re saying is right on the money. I once was involved with a company that had designed its website decently, but the code was not “nice and clean” like we prefer. This led to many inefficiencies in even the most minor site updates and changes. So, for this website the “redesign” consisted of a major cleaning of the code while keeping the user-facing appearance very similar. In this way, we were able to keep the user familiarity with the site while improving load times, navigation, and our own efficiencies on the back-end.
September 28th, 2009
3:31 pm
I’ve done a lot of redesigned, I think giving clients clean code, clean crisp designs and considering some basic usability matters makes a large improvement.
September 28th, 2009
4:16 pm
[...] on website redesign: Seth Godin Blog: Things to ask before you redo your website Grokdotcom Blog: Website Redesign Roundup User Interface Engineering Blog: Thinking in the Right Terms- 7 Components for a Successful Website [...]
September 29th, 2009
9:35 am
Para nasil kazanilir, internetten para nasıl kazanılır, kolay para nasıl kazanılır
September 29th, 2009
10:13 am
We just launched our redesign yesterday.
The design is very different from the previous version but we focused on allowing our visitors to find information about our toolset much faster and easier.
We also placed more emphasis on calls to action.
September 29th, 2009
12:34 pm
[...] Source – GrokDotCom [...]
September 29th, 2009
2:13 pm
Speaking of web design, in Firefox (3.0.14)and Mac (10.5) your layout is broken ;-( There is a huge empty space to the right hand side (scrollbar is nearly a page wide) and some of the videos in blog posts overlay part of the text, thought you should know, SY
September 30th, 2009
9:36 am
Thanks blogging tips. We’re investigating the problem.
I’m not seeing it on my mac running firefox 3.0.14 but I’ll try some more scenarios.
September 30th, 2009
12:17 pm
Would a screen shot help? I am still getting the huge empty space on the right hand side, SY
October 1st, 2009
1:01 am
redesigning will help you identify which and what designs did the public want.
October 1st, 2009
11:55 am
Redesigning is always nice but the problem with it is that sometimes people do a complete overhaul of the original project. This can lead to some drastic changes in site and link structure, which of course is not good for SEO. A site can’t just be eye candy, it actually has to be a well built machine in my opinion.
October 2nd, 2009
10:22 am
Nice post. I think that changing the design of a website is a good idea of course. Word is changing so why internet websites should stay the same ?
But don’t forget to keep somme graphics standards…
October 3rd, 2009
4:11 am
I think there’s still a key problem with saying ‘this arbitrary level is good, that one is bad’.
October 3rd, 2009
8:19 pm
This was a good article to read and redesigning a website will keep it fresh and up with the times, but what happens if you’re constantly redesigning a website? Would that confuse visitors coming to the site e.g if the overall design changes would the sites branding and image change with it?
October 5th, 2009
3:57 pm
nice post
October 6th, 2009
1:32 pm
I go for incremental changes. But if you look at my main site 2 months ago you wouldn’t recognize it.
October 7th, 2009
10:04 am
“when it came time to start optimizing, the marketing team found many unexpected constraints”
That’s a real problem for sure !
If the new design is cool and more efficient for users, don’t forget to think to developpers too !
October 8th, 2009
5:16 am
“a good (re)design is one that can stay fresh and current for several years, and accommodate a process of continuous improvement and incremental change.” thats pretty much it in a nutshell.
October 8th, 2009
8:36 am
Great tips! thank you.
best regards
October 13th, 2009
1:44 pm
[...] came across a post by Brendan Regan over at FutureNow that lays this all out quite clearly. Brendan reminds us that users (i.e.: your [...]
October 16th, 2009
12:31 pm
my site also returns an error in my frefoz
October 17th, 2009
5:32 am
Great tips! thank you.
best regards
October 19th, 2009
10:32 am
Most of our clients came to use with complete disasters for websites. I wish I could just offer advice on small updates, that would make life much easier for us. But usually a total overhaul is in order. And by the time they are done paying for the original mess that someone else did, then paying us to fix the mess with a new site, people just don’t want to spend any more money for “continuous improvement”, they just let it sit, get mangled or out of date, and then begin the cycle all over again.
October 23rd, 2009
7:16 pm
“if you are considering a moderate to major redesign, keep in mind that usability testing can be done on very simple prototypes before you make major investments.”
I will surely keep this in mind. Anyway, thank you for the tips and I hope to see more of these helpful tips in the future.