This series of articles are going to be about a site redesign. While I am not a designer, and some say I am a hack programmer, I have been around the web enough and been a member of quite a few top notch teams on redesigning small sites to very big ones. And trust me redesign always means “a fluid changing process”. This means that there is never one redesign and it is over with. Redesigning is an iterative, a constantly improving process. Like a shark, when the shark stops moving it dies…
The site I am going to cover in this redesign is LockAndKeyEvents.com (LNK), because this site was originally programmed by me back in 2002, and the storied site, which is doing well these days, was thrown together in a 3 week period, albeit, it was literally made with chunks of PHP from here and there, and the design was a actually acceptable back then. But that was then and this is now. We are in a new era of Post Web 2.0, almost Web 3.0.
Fast forward 7 years, 3 owners later, tons of changes in the world from programming to design to SEO to business practices and LNK was basically left alone, did its job and grew and grew, but little of the technology and design went along with it. This means it is time for a redesign. By redesign this includes everything from design improvements to technology addons, open source implementations and the bells and whistles by the time the team working on it is finished.
So, this redesign concept will cover what is happening and the impact from a functional perspective through to a design perspective and what all of this means. And along the way I am going to mention how we are using the conversion formula of MarketingExperiments and the theories of “Don’t Make Me Think”, a classic. Plus you need to know the conversion rate improvements and why and how we are doing them. We are going to let you into the mind of what is going on being these improvements and why. If you have a comment for me or want to throw your hat in the ring and let us know how we can even improve it more, that is great…
Either sign up on this blog to find out about the next installment of this article or follow me at twitter @dgudema.