I believe revisiting and revamping your website design once a year is a necessary evil. Your webiste is the first impression visitors will get of your business. And website design is like clothing fashion, there are new trends every year and the clothes / designs from last year suddenly look old.
You may still like your design but this is not the point. You don’t want visitors to believe you’re not aware of the latest trends in web design (especially if your business, as mine, revolves around website design and development). Of course, you should use this excuse to reconsider other aspects of your site’s content and organization (including also checking the compatibility with the newest browsers) but the most important thing is to realign your site with the current fashion trends and make sure it looks “modern” and according to what visitors expect to see when landing in a website nowadays.
This week we have just released the third version of our “Migrate to WordPress” site. See the evolution below (and I hope you agree that it looks better than the previous ones). We are also trying to be consistent with the company services and eat our own dog food (the first site was a pure HTML site which, when you’re trying to convince people to migrate to WordPress, is not exactly appropriate; in this last version we moved to WPEngine, the WP hosting provider we recommend).
Version 1
Pure HTML version
Version 2
Wordpress site with the typical slideshow in the home page (so popular before but that now looks oldfashioned at least IMHO)
Version 3
A more flat design with a responsive theme (in contrast with the previous version that looked terrible from a mobile device)..
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In my opinion it depends on the business you are in. When you have a business that is mostly searched for to do a specific task (where I would also put Migrate To WordPress into) a revolution is a good thing to show that you are aware of the latest trends. But for other business, where customers visit your website regularly to use a provided service, a evolution over the time is the better approach.
Maybe your blog could also get a evolution or revolution 😉 (mine got it’s revolution today).
I agree. If we´re talking about website / application where the same users need to visit again and again then you should avoid big surprises (but you still should do a revolution in the pages where you´re trying to sign up new users)