Top 10 Great Points That Help You to Redesign an Existing Website

1st Oct 2013 | Posted by Eko S. | 2 Comments

Website owners usually find the need to update and change the design of their business or blog site in order to make it look fresh and more interesting to their online visitors. The greatest challenge that comes with website redesigning is to bring new changes without having to disturb the important elements that the site owner wants to retain on their website.

Redesign Websites Tips

Before you bring new touches and do some tweaking on a website to give it a new look, you may want to consider these 10 great points that will help you to redesign an existing website without heading towards a disastrous change that can give the website owner a fit.

#1. Moving large amount of data may be pointless

Your client just might be using a directory type website that contains large amount of data that are important to its business. While you may be tempted of moving them, try to consider whether it might have took the client longer period of time to build those data before and it may entail another longer period of time of moving them back again, not to mention the cost it may take him for doing the same process again. Your database scheme thus should consider this point prior to deciding of migrating them somewhere else from the client’s website.

#2. Weighing the scale between using old or new content management system

The content management system technology is one of the most common aspects of a website that a web designer usually tries to make some changes from. Before you start doing so, take note whether your client is technology savvy or not. There is a possibility that the client may want to dwell on the traditional CMS that he knows and is unwilling to learn about the latest CMS techniques. Your client’s convenience should be taken into consideration in terms of the ease that he will experience on maintaining his website CMS. Introducing a different CMS platform for your client’s website that he doesn’t know how to use and manage can pose a problem later on. Before you find yourself being blamed by your client’s inefficiency of managing his website CMS, make sure to inquire from your client whether he prefers to run a simple CMS that is currently being used for his website and you may opt to simply update them to make some changes and redesigning.

#3. Website server support and your re-designing tools should be complementary

Sometimes it is possible to experience conflicts whenever a website designer uses a tool such as a plugin or libraries that are not supported by the client’s website hosting server. Before you try to make some changes on the website design, take the time to review the hosting agreement of your client’s host provider with respect to the website functionality available. It often difficult to keep a website running on a hosting environment that is incompatible to its features and functionality. Issues such as using .NET when redesigning the website may occur but it is not a supported language of the hosting server as it runs PHP. The IT department of your client’s website may also be handling this aspect of its website maintenance and you no other choice but to adapt to their current web server host environment when redesigning their site.

#4. Review the coverage of your redesigning services

Whenever a website owner pays for a makeover on his site, he is aiming for something beneficial for taking such measure otherwise he will not be willing to spend some investment for redesigning his site. You should be able to ask the client what he expects from your services. Some want to obtain a technical solution when revolutionizing the design of their website such as making it more scalable, extendible and with better stability alongside the redesigning of the website. It best to gauge whether your services will be able to meet these requirements otherwise you are better of declining the job.

#5. Becoming familiar with the website’s UI and architecture

This point of consideration of your redesigning scheme will have to deal about analyzing the architecture of the website and its user interface. Online users are now getting more engaged in scrolling down the web page owing to the growing popularity of using mobile sites that will require them to scroll down in order to view the contents of the site. The traditional style of web designing is keeping content above the fold. This rule no longer applies where the users need to scroll when viewing content on a mobile interface such as when using tablets or Smartphones when browsing through the web. Scrolling parallax website interface is an example that is growing in popularity these days. Try to review your client’s website performance using analytic data and find out which contents are important to your client and do some makeover on its interface to make it gain better exposure.

#6. Choose a technology with a sense of practicality

Your redesigning efforts should always consider practicality in terms of the technology that you use when doing so. Taking a step towards using the more modern web designing technology such as rebuilding the website’s Flash site using jQuery or HTML 5 will give you more benefits and advantage. This will allow the website to be up and running smoothly on devices that cannot view the old site and try to tinker on the scalable technical base as well when redesigning the site.

#7. You may not need to make an absolute change on the website

Sometimes, no matter how old the web design can be, you must recognize the fact that it is well designed and contains great hierarchy of images that are worth retaining. Keep an open mind that while your job is to give the website a new look and keep it fresh and new, it is prudent to maintain those good visual elements and images that is an asset of the website. You may be compelled to retain them and introduce your own design to complement its value to make the website look even better.

#8. Accessing the website source code

It is easier to do the redesigning job when you have access to the source code that is used for creating the website. This is significant since you need to evaluate several aspects of the website elements and to identify how well the website is structured to perform well in terms of SEO. Sometimes, some website look awful but it is doing very good in its SEO performance. You will want to get hold of the source code of the site to identify which part to retain on the design that gives the website a good performance. It will not be to the client’s best interest to introduce a new design that will negatively impact its website performance. Your goal in redesigning at this point is to retain those important codes that influence the site to perform better while adding more complementary designs to reinforce its positive impact to the website.

#9. Considering the code base of the website

Some websites that are at least three years older usually use divs instead of tables. You may want to consider the code base used on the site in terms of its size and how well written the code is. Try to gauge the need of starting all over from scratch to give the website an entirely new structure and make a new code base that will bring the website a new mark up.

#10. Coordinate your design to the website brand

Your client’s website may have developed its own global brand that you will need to incorporate in your new website design. You can always coordinate to the client’s brand marketing department to obtain insights on how they want to present their brand on the site and to know the boundaries and the guidelines needed to uphold their brand as significant to your website design.

- Written by Stacy Carter -

She is a tech writer and a guest blogger laying out for tech news via online exposures. She writes for netspysoftware.com site for 3 years already.