According to San Francisco Bay Area lore, there is never a moment when some part of the Golden Gate Bridge is not undergoing a paint job. À la Sisyphus, by the time the painters get from one side to the other, the thing needs painting again. A Web site works the same way: Once you finish it, technology has improved, users have more bandwidth and higher expectations, your needs have changed. And hey! - a week after the shiny new site rolls off the lot, it's time for a redesign.
Many commercial Web sites were initially created through a kind of vague spontaneous combustion. Somebody's nephew knew HTML and had a summer to kill. The rest of a company's collateral materials - brochures, CD-ROMs, business cards - may look slick, well considered, and match (with a consistent look and feel, logo treatment, tag lines, etc.), but the Web site appears totally unrelated. As more and more folks use the Web to learn about your company and products, the gray backgrounds, push-pin graphics, and fat horizontal rules on that first-generation site can drive business away.
Sometimes the site needs only a face lift. Slap up some new graphics, toss in some sparkle, such as rollovers or animation, and that's enough. But considering how fast things become outdated on the Web, most of time the site needs a complete structural overhaul.
One of the beauties, and the curses, of a Web site is that it's perpetually updatable. You can build it as you go, dropping in content and adding sections as needed. Unfortunately, this can lead to sprawling, unnavigable sites. Not only must your site clear these organizational hurdles, but to stay competitive, it needs to keep up with the Joneses - which isn't easy, considering that the very nature of the Web is always changing.
These days commerce sites are more than just static brochures ("Welcome to the Web site for [company name], makers of [company product]. Interested in buying [company product]? Then please visit our store, located at [company address].") Now sites are fully functional businesses, communities, and resources in their own right. To bridge the generational gap between your company's first online efforts and the kind of site you now need to stay au courant, you must reorganize and rethink everything.
But whether you need a simple cosmetic change or a from-the-ground-up overhaul, a redesign offers Web designers a unique challenge. Generals always fight the previous war: Despite innovations in wonder guns or super jets, they still employ the strategies used in the last conflict. Web redesigners work in reverse: They must anticipate the challenges of the next redesign as they plan for this one. Almost-ready technology needs considering. So do upcoming changes in a company, like new products, new processes, co-branding. The key is to create a site that's as up-to-date as you can manage and flexible enough to accommodate change. It's also important to know when some feature or new direction is actually better left for the next redesign.
Striking a balance between what you need and what you can feasibly do as you update your site is tricky business. Fortunately, this process isn't uncharted territory. Some sites (ahem) have been through as many as five redesigns. In fact, updating and reworking sites has become many a Web designer's bread and butter.
