redesigning your own website
In January, 2008 we finally redesigned our website. It was long overdue. As a matter of fact, neglecting our own sites is so common a problem amongst web developers, that some folks started up Design Deadline which offers a public review of the redesign, which we participated in.
Redesigning your own website is a little different from redesigning someone else’s. It’s easy to get bogged down in minor details and obsess over all the little things that no one else really cares about. I think our own challenges with this redesign were not so different from the challenges some of our clients face.
- Hurdle 1: To rebrand or not to rebrand otherwise known as “Do we have all the pieces? Are they the right pieces?”.
Our business name is hard for people to pronounce and spell and few people know what “semiotics” is. Semiotics isn’t a good candidate topic for an elevator pitch. Our discussions about redesign became cyclical discussions about rebranding. We finally decided that the name does actually describe what we do and we could live with it a little longer.
Moving On. - Hurdle 2: Design for Visitors vs. Design for Ourselves
That’s a no-brainer in any redesign process …. websites exist for visitors to use. But, when designing your own website there are no external checks and balances. Without a reporting schedule, it takes self discipline to stick to priorities. At one point during this process, I started obsessing over microformats and whether microformats were appropriate to non-blog pages that aren’t reviews …. interesting but not high on the priorities list and I’ll wager that very few of our visitors care about microformats. Those that do care didn’t look until they read this. - Hurdle 3: Decoupling the end product from the need to make it a fun learning process (in other words … get a handle on the NADD)
This is another reason web developers don’t get around to updating their own sites. We explore newish technologies and techniques and give ourselves permission to do so by declaring we’re “rebuilding the dusty old website finally”.
What ends up happening is the new technology or technique is underwhelming, or it’s overkill, or it takes forever to learn and then the best practices change so frequently we can’t keep up, the trend changes before we finish and we’re too embarrassed to go live with a now-outdated trend that looks like every other I-read-about-that-yesterday website, or it plain doesn’t work. It’s never really good enough … and the challenge is get call it “good enough” without scratching your eyes out
Really, the core of our website is just have a few pages and a blog.