New design VS old design

Andylaws,

With most any decision you decide to make to your website, your choices should be driven by data and not opinions. Of course there are some common web conventions that you should follow and I suppose if your site was in really bad shape to begin with then there are some tips people could suggest. Otherwise you really want to ask yourself some questions and try and find data to support any decision that you make.

For example what is your goal for your website? What does it do for you? Next, does the design help you accomplish that goal? If it does but you think it could do it better then perhaps you should try changing some things and running an A/B or multivariate test to determine which design elements help your site accomplish your goals better. You should not just redesign a site for redesign’s sake. If you go this route, you have no idea if all the work you put in changing it will be effective for completing your end goal.

Some “big company” websites may be designed a certain way because that design helps with their end goals. You should never put in design elements just because they are the newest thing or because they look cool.

In the “why redesign” section of this slide show, the presenter gives some examples of goals that you might pursue,

Redesigning Your Website: When, Why, & How - SEO.com

You may want to make the site more user friendly, you may want to make it easier to complete some action, etc…

Hope that helps,

Shawn

Personally, I encountered traffic drops in a few months after I changed to a new design. It can be true that this will affect your visitors, especially if your main source was from the search engine. Different design may affect your SEO, keywords, how the page rank and crawl by the search engine, and therefore affect your traffics.

Therefore, make sure you have a solid plan before the move.

It is true that website having a new design goes down on Google and that is why due to this drop you will find less number of visitors but this will be the case when your traffic will be from search engine only but if your traffic is from the networking site e.g. facebook , then there will not be much problem for you.

Thanks for the messages, I believe I will have to do the redesign of my website, but still - little be little and do not change the place of them main buttons, that should help me avoid issues with some new signup loss.