martinship - 8:26 am on Jul 5, 2007 (gmt 0)

As long as it works, you really don't need to make it pretty. The most successful sites on the internet all look dull and haven't had a facelift in years (google, ebay, webmasterworld...) but they have everything where it's clearly accessible. In some ways keeping their formats the same actually encourages customers because the sites feel familiar and reliable, which makes customers more confident about returning.

Ah! I wondered when somebody was going to mention this very site as an example of commercial sites that didn't have a fancypants web 2.0 style design with rounded corners, flash logos, color gradients, huge text sizes, alpha transparency, etc.

Honestly, if I woke up tomorrow and webmasterworld had a new design, I'd be a bit miffed. Generally, people resist change. I've come to enjoy this quirky but fast loading graphics light design that doesn't look pretty but does its job well: serving up great content.

It's not how your site looks visually, it's the content and the clear organization and presentation of the content. As an example, there'd be no extra point in having alpha transparency applied to the little yellow triangular "you've posted in this thread" markers or deciding to give all the table elements tiled graphical backgrounds. In fact, some of the stuff that designers do to pretty up a site, like replacing text with icons, can just be confusing.

However, I think there are several compelling cases for redesign: lack of continuity, user requests, and refactoring.

If part of your site has one design, and another part has a different design, or each page has completely different fonts, buttons, colors or link styles there's a clear problem. You do need a unified design. If elements have been hacked on without much thought to the original design, that could also be a reason to update the design.

Of course, your users might be signaling that they'd like to see a redesign. Maybe it's hard to access a section, or you've outgrown your old menu design so it doesn't fit on one screenful. Maybe the focus of the site has shifted and the old logo or layout isn't appropriate anymore because users have to go hunting to find the stuff they want.

Finally, you might want to consider refactoring your existing design. A new content management system could be just what you need to rapidly add and update content, but rather than trying to hack it into old table-based layouts by simply adding some css here and there, you could create a modern design that closely mirrors your current site but gives you additional functionality. This might include replacing graphical buttons with CSS styled buttons that look the same, or changing your fonts to use "em" rather than a fixed size.