How Soon is Too Soon?
When redesigning your site, whatever it may be, you don’t want to do it too often. Or not often enough for that matter. It’s good to find a balance when releasing a new design, but it all depends on your site.
For a personal blog, you’re not going to want to do it too often. Once you find something great that you really like you should really hold on to it. Because of the nature of the site, you are very likely to have many returning visitors. Return visitors don’t like having a new design in front of them every two months, which is something that I’ve been doing, but it’s probably not best. Another thing, if every three months or so you ‘realign’ your design and perfect it over time, always improving I’m sure your reader will appreciate it.
On the other hand, completely overhauling your site every three months, or even less then six months with readerships can sometimes rub your readers the wrong way. Personally, I love change. When a site redesigns I’m always happy to see it, but some people like a consistent design. Sometimes after a while the design becomes your identity and then you really can’t change it.
For your portfolio site, the restrictions are really loose, if any. You are likely to have very few to no return visitors to a portfolio as the content is never fresh. Unless for some reason your portfolio gets a ton of traffic (which seems to be rare) you’re usually free to overhaul, realign or scrap your site at any time for the new visitors to see. Without a return visitor, it’s really up to you how long a design stays on for.
Basically, the more return users you have, the less you’re going to want to change your site around. Next time if you feel a design is too soon, maybe make some new features instead, or improve usability. There’s always things to do instead of just changing the way something looks!
Leave a comment
Andy
May 31st, 2007 at 8:19 PM
Definitely a key issue for me. I have a bad habit of redesigning sites before I’ve even completed the back end. However recently I seem to have tamed myself.
I definitely agree that a blog needs a redesign now and again, but as you say not too often. It’s always nice to see something new, that is, providing the new design is better than the old one
Ron S
June 1st, 2007 at 8:12 AM
When I redesign a site, it’s usually due to two reasons: I don’t like it, and it was inadequate from the start. These two factors have killed designs before they were one month old.
I suppose a design shouldn’t last that short, but if it’s ugly as sin, what can you do?
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