The process of redesigning a website

I decided to create a few animations to show an overview of the process behind redesigning a website. Usually when I am given a website to rebuild, the first major thing that needs to be adjusted is the width of the layout. Older websites were built for smaller monitors back when an 800×600 screen resolution was a common thing. Nowadays, screens are at least 1024×768 screen resolution even on laptops. What does this mean for web design? Well websites should be around 1024 pixels wide.

The second main issue I find with older websites is that they are often overly cluttered. Buttons were bigger, ads were bigger, and a lot of unnecessary elements are placed on the pages such as a overwhelming “shop now” button in the header of an e-commerce site when ‘shopping’ is clearly implied. Why so much clutter? When websites were first becoming popular to household users, much of the things we take for granted on the screen did not yet exist. For example, the main navigation always being on top, buttons being rolled over to create a drop-down menu, and font styles being varied to differentiate links from regular text are all simple web “rules” that did not exist at the birth of web design. So instead websites were built to show everything all at once rather than hiding everything in a clean and simple website yet can still allowing the content to be easily found.

A website’s main purpose is to display information to a user, but of course this information must be presented as intriguing to the user and that’s where design comes in. It’s that balance of intrigue and practicality that makes a good design.