Are you thinking about a redesign for your website?  Have you been looking at your competitors and feel if you trot out a fresh look you might increase your traffic?  If you run a website, chances are you often wonder whether it is the right time to do a total redesign of the layout of your website. I am often approached by clients here at Beach-Net who desire a website redesign. It's important to first determine why a redesign is needed. Here are some points to consider:

Bad Reasons for Redesign

Often web site owners spend huge amounts of time viewing their websites and become bored at looking at the same design after a short period of time. This is not a good reason for redesign. You should view your website throught the eyes of your users who only view it occasionally.

If your website is professional looking, easy to navigate, functions and ranks well in the search engines, you might not want to try to fix what isn't broken.  Redsigning your web site will often entail a change in the file structure.  Remember, the existing file structure has been indexed and linked by many search engines.  You will often take  "a hit" in your search engine rankings after a redesign - fortunately there are ways around this if after consideration you determine a redesign is necessary.

Are you thinking of a redesign just for the sake of it?  If you answered yes to that question, it is not yet the right time to do a redesign. Remember, a design serves a specific purpose.  If you are not sure whether to do an overhaul of your site, keep in mind that your current design might have a specific purpose that you might not know about. You will lose that function if you do a redesign. Consider your website's 'regular' users.  They know just where to go on your website to find what they want, which sections are where and their word of mouth advertising is worth it's weight in gold.  Remember always to look at your website through the eyes of your users.

On the other hand, if your website has had the same website design for 5 or 10 years, perhaps it is high time to do a redesign. The last thing you would ever want to happen to your site is when visitors leave your site without taking a look at your content just because the design is old fashioned. If this is your case, here are some points to ponder before doing a redesign.

Redesigning your website is like performing plastic surgery on it. Your website loses its current identity (for the better or worse) and your regular visitors might not recognise your new design at first glance - think branding. You risk losing them just because they thought they landed on the wrong page. Hence, it is very important that you retain a characteristic feature from your old layout if possible. Perhaps it is the logo of your site; perhaps it is the same text style for the title for your site.

Good Reasons for Redesign

Nowadays, in this trendy world, people get very uptight when they do not look entirely presentable. This would also be the case in website designing. Every individual would definitely want their website to look good.

If your site has a confusing layout, poor navigation, takes way to long to load, does poorly in the search engine indexes or has poor conversion rates for sales then a redesign would be in order

Here are a few things we could look out for when wanting to create a professional looking webpage.

Color Schemes and Themes.

When designing, always choose matching colors. An example of a matching color would be to have a dark background, with visible words and designs. With the dark theme, try not to mix too many bright colors into the design. What we should NEVER do, is to mix two very different colors, such as purple and yellow. Now, of course, it would depend on the purpose of the website, but those two colors are too striking for one who wants it to look more professional.

Themes must always suit the company or rather, the organization / etc. If the website was made to cater for a food company, it would be wise to stick to that particular category, rather than to revert to a different theme, such as machinery. Fonts should be used in regard to the formality of the website. A simple sans-serif font would suffice in most cases. Exceptional cases such as design and art groups might want to use fanciful designs and fonts. Of course, that’s only if you know what you’re doing.

Finally, we must always try to think of our visitors, see the way they see. The graphic resolutions and file sizes of the pictures must not be too large in terms of size. This is to allow maximum compatibility and cater our visitor’s needs. So, planning is something we should always do, before attempting anything.

To play it safe, let your visitors do the talking. If they think it is necessary for the website to have a fresh look, give it to them!