I’ve been reading this article from Gerry Mcgovern with a heading ‘Web redesign is bad strategy’.
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2007/nt-2007-07-30-redesign.htm
My reasons for a website redesign is to respond from customer feedback about the site, reviews from usability experts, company rebranding and make the site visually appealing.
Another would be to make a site SEO friendly. Search Engine Optimisation is more than just ‘keywords’ and ‘descriptions’ but contents. Search engines cant read Flash pages and images needs ‘alt’ tags.
What is your reason for a website redesign?
Well, having just re-designed a few sites, I have to disagree entirely with Gerry’s article. I assume he was paid to spout all that mis-information and really he doesnt seem to have the slightest grasp about what is good or bad for anything.
Notice if you will that one third of his post is consumed (padded) by his simple analogy of the Jones family, which was at best weak and I struggled to find any real similarity between cats peeing in the wrong place and efficiently managing a website …..anyone else share that thought?
His view that most websites are re-designed as they have fallen into disrepair is just wrong!
Most websites are re-designed as the marketing departments of the company go through a re-branding exercise or a promotional strategy change and, quality of your web presence is the obvious place to make the first changes when you implement the new strategies.
From this stems the need to stay abreast of new technologies and embrace them where they will work for your organisation. Dynamic HTML, SEO, CSS are all examples of progressive technologies and all make good reasons to re-design.
Sure you can post "good quality content" in a plain old html page but if it doesnt look exciting then people wont read it.
It seems that if Gerry had his way, we would all still be reading text web pages…….you just have to move with the times….again, anyone with me there?
Hmm, turned into a bit of a rant there……hope you enjoy 
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