When you finally realize the harsh truth that your site needs a redesign, what should you do? An article by Ley Alcantara will help with the answer.
In 2008, after three years of owning my own business, Lealea Design , I realized it was time to show my peers (a frequent source of intercession and speaking invitations) and potential clients that I was capable enough and keeping up with the latest developments and trends in our industry. Furthermore, I discovered that my three-year-old website no longer sufficiently reflects my personal brand and is not a proper showcase of the design services I offer, my abilities, or myself. Since self-branding is one of my specialties, it was inexcusable.
Still, I felt like redesigning my own website was a Sisyphean chore, and since my original design was getting rave reviews and making me money, I stuck to the motto “don’t mess with what works.” It was a convenient excuse.
I got my first sight a year later
There were still plenty of jobs, but with the slowing economy, I began to clearly realize that even though I was proud of the first incarnation of my website, it was the main thing for my survival in the job market, and that therefore I could not afford to risk its development stagnating .
You design for the worst client: yourself
When you’re a freelancer, redesigning your own website is a kind of masochism. You have no co-workers or an umbrella corporation, no one to share the painful transformation with you: you are all alone. As the designer who wrote the still talked about article The Art of Self-Branding , I knew my website had to be perfect. People are sure to scrutinize any updates to the site, so I couldn’t afford anything that could damage my reputation.
When I design for a client, we discuss the field and the time schedule, we write a plan of project goals (design brief), we talk about the budget and certain restrictions. We pay attention to brand, content, information architecture (IA) and user experience from the very beginning. When I was redoing my own design, the only thing I really took into account was time: “I want to run this on such and such a date.” I thought I’d just jump right in, open Photoshop, and go.
But I was wrong.
The beginning of the redesign of the own website
I opened Photoshop and froze immediately. My computer and software didn’t freeze, it was me clutching the mouse with convulsive fingers and staring at a blank 1024 x 768 screen.
I colored the screen and moved the thailand phone number data mouse here and there. Nothing happened.
No, it was still neither the computer nor the software that didn’t know how to proceed.
That’s me.
It was necessary for me to think about my approach and start in a different way.
A fresh start for your own website redesign
To get my website redesign on track, I went back to the starting line from where I start when designing for a client, to the glue that ties all the elements of a business to a website together: the brand.
Cameron Moll’s article Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign highlighted the importance of designing with a purpose to ap how brand social media marketing has evolved into the psychology of the industry. It’s quite difficult to keep your website design fresh while staying true to a brand you’ve spent years building. Therefore, it didn’t make sense bw lists to start from the very beginning, but rather to build on what I already had and polish, strengthen and refresh it, not to create something that clients and visitors have not yet known at all. The website needed to be reorganized.