There are several reasons why a website should be redesigned. For example, a dated user interface and graphics could imply to potential customers that the company does not care or that the company might be in financial trouble that cannot even afford a “facelift”. We have already written an article on the importance of Aesthetics in Web Design. However, the main reasons are to adapt to the market and try to get a competitive advantage over similar companies.
In 2005, Cameron Moll wrote a piece on A List Apart titled “Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign.” This article is recommended to anyone who works with UX and Web design for a living. He explains that redesigning completely is more of a response to just the aesthetics from the point of view of the designer and not taking into consideration users’ needs.
In the case of us at Haketi, we have realigned the design for several years now, and not only design changes in terms of look & feel but the tech changes as well and it must be done from the ground up. Therefore, instead of using our last design, we decided to redesign the website completely.
Speed was another reason to redesign. Our previous site was built with a static file generator that only outputs HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. There were no calls to the database or any external APIs. This kept our site blazing fast providing a great user experience to the visitors. For instance, rebuilding Pinterest with performance in mind, decreased the loading time by 40% while also increasing SEO traffic and conversion rate by 15%. So, performance is very important for a business. If your site is slow, there are thousands of competing websites that are waiting for your visitors to come.
The reason for ditching the static file generator is that we wanted the entire team to contribute to our blog. With a static file generator, it is possible but more cumbersome so we decided to go with WordPress which is the tool for building business websites today. This also demonstrates to our customers that we use the same products that we create for them. Even with WordPress in the backend, we are getting outstanding numbers in performance which helps our SEO rankings and the experience of our visitors as they don’t have to wait a lot of seconds for the page to load.
In conclusion, this redesign was overdue but it was only necessary if we could achieve the same or similar numbers with WordPress compared to static files generator. The good news is that We Did It!