When Should I Redesign My Website?

If you own a website, the chances are that you often wonder whether it is the proper time for you to do a complete redesign of your website’s layout. Below are a few points for you to consider:

Are you looking to redesign for no particular reason? If the answer is yes, then now might not be the right time for you to redesign. Don’t forget, a design needs to serve a specific purpose. If you aren’t sure whether to carry out an overhaul of your site, you must bear in mind that your current design might have a specific purpose that you might have no knowledge about. If you do a redesign, you will probably lose that function.

However, if your website has had a similar website design since 1990, maybe it is high time for you to do a redesign. The last thing you would ever want to happen to your site is visitors leaving your site without taking a look at your content because the design is old fashioned. If this might be your case, here are a few points to consider before you carry out a redesign project.

Redesigning your website is very much like performing cosmetic surgery. Your website will lose its current identity (for the better or worse) and your regular visitors might not recognize your new design straight away. You will risk losing them just because they thought they landed on the wrong page. Therefore, it is very important that you retain a characteristic feature from your old layout. Maybe it is the logo of your site; or perhaps it is the same text style for the title for your site.

To be safe, try to put a poll on your site in order to let your visitors do the talking. If they find it necessary for the website to have an alluring look, then go ahead and give it to them!


Michael Beattie is contributing editor at WebDesignArticles.net. This article may be reproduced provided that its complete content, links and author byline are kept intact and unchanged. No additional links permitted. Hyperlinks and/or URLs must remain both human clickable and search engine spiderable.

Improving Website Usability

No matter how good your website design might be, if it is hard for you to reach your site’s content then your site will be really quite useless. Below are a few tips that will help you to improve on your website’s usability in order to ensure that it serves its functions in an optimal manner.

The first method is to make sure that your site’s content has a suitable topography. If you have large blocks of text, try to make sure to use CSS in order to space out the lines accordingly. The longer a single line of text might be, the greater you should make the line-height of each line. Further, try to make sure that the font size of your text is big enough to be read with ease. Some sites contain a 10-pixel-tall text in Verdana font; although that might look neat and tidy, you will have to really focus your eyes to read the actual text properly.

Try to make it easy for visitors to find the content they need on your site. If you have thousands of articles on your site and a certain visitor wants to find one single article in the pile, you will have to provide a practicable means that will make it possible for visitors to do that without any trouble. Whether it is an SQL-driven database search engine or just a glossary or index of articles that you have, providing such a feature will ensure your visitors can use your site more easily.

If you don’t want to lose visitors, try to make sure that your site loads faster. Most internet users will click away from a website if it doesn’t load completely within 15 seconds, so make sure that only the best of your website is delivered to the visitors and as soon as possible, in order to retain their attention.

Lastly, try to test each and every link on your site before it goes online. There is nothing worse and unprofessional than a site with broken links, so make sure you bear it well in mind.


Norman Mather is contributing editor at WebDesignArticles.net. This article may be reproduced provided that its complete content, links and author byline are kept intact and unchanged. No additional links permitted. Hyperlinks and/or URLs must remain both human clickable and search engine spiderable.