The Banyan Infotech - Website Redesign

With the rapid changing technology and constant evolving of web, your site starts to look and act old very soon. If a website is not redesigned or regularly updated, it has the possibility to be sunk in the search engine listings.

Three Golden Rules of redesigning a website are:

1. Change the Look, Not the Feel:

When a site has an established audience, changing the design too drastically could be suicide for returning traffic.

Simply put: you do not want your established visitors to wonder if they’ve arrived at the wrong site. But other than that, go nuts! The old design shouldn’t limit you creatively, just take a few key elements and make sure the new site is still recognizable.

If the logo is strong enough, it can probably carry the transition by itself. Otherwise, look to the old site for whichever visual elements became the brand of the site. Keep an open mind; the site’s brand could be just about anything: the color scheme, typography, icons or photographs. Repeat these key themes in your new design, preferably in a similar location.

2. Avoid Losing Search Engine Rankings:

One of the most important things when overhauling a site is to make sure the new site doesn’t lose any search engine ranking. Sure, any restructuring will probably cause an "awkward adolescence" as Google reindexes your site’s pages, but there are a number of things you can do to make it less painful.

First, make sure you don’t lose any of your old site’s title tags or meta descriptions.Additionally, keep any of the old URIs the same if at all possible. But if you have a really good reason for changing them, make sure to use 301 redirects.A 301 redirect tells Google that a page has moved permanently, meaning that it should take all of the search engine mojo it had given the old link and transfer it to the new one.


3. Back Up the Old Site and Use a Development Environment:

Nobody likes losing content.So back up your files and databases often.Additionally, it’s a good idea to set up a dev environment for your new site. The advantages are pretty obvious: you won’t break anything or display any debugging information on your live site.