There are numerous ways to redesign a website, including focusing on aesthetics, on accessibility, or on frequent visitors. Many individuals and companies choose to focus on aesthetics to give their website a more eye-appealing and modern design to keep up with style trends. Others decide to improve accessibility to better accommodate the blind, visually-impaired, or deaf. Still, other webmasters believe it best to redesign a website slowly over time to allow their most frequent visitors time to adjust and provide feedback. Of course, it is entirely possible to improve a website with all of these aspects in mind.
The aesthetics of a website include its overall color theme, layout, and font usage. With today’s technology, it is usually relatively easy to choose a new color theme or set a new default font. Applying new layouts is sometimes automatically done too, but these can be tricky for a novice webmaster. Previously untested layouts, also known as templates, can cause a website to return errors when accessed if the code is outdated or otherwise broken in some way. For the more experienced webmaster, these things can be custom coded and applied to make the website one-of-a-kind. Changing these website aspects can give a website an entirely different look and feel.
Another way to redesign a website is to improve accessibility for the impaired. This widens the website’s general audience and also widens the potential client or customer base. In fact, in some jurisdictions, it is illegal to have a website not readily accessible to the impaired. To redesign a website in this way, the web designer can make easy-to-find transcripts of the website’s video or audio files. The web designer can also change the color theme of the website to a color-blind friendly one, or give visitors an option of changing the color theme themselves.
A lot of popular websites improve both functionality and aesthetics over a long period of time, being careful to never introduce much at once. These businesses sometimes have millions of visitors that have been loyal users since the business began. Often, visitors do not want to relearn how to navigate the website, deal with new features that do not benefit them, or reenter information that was already given. Due to this balancing act between updates and user happiness, a popular website might always look a little outdated or disorganized. This often tends to apply to large social networking and e-commerce websites.