New site design made live – and then changed
On Wednesday 3 December, after months of preparation, I made the long-awaited new design live
But within a few hours of making it live, on the basis of monitoring, I decided to start making changes.
Certain aspects of the new design didn’t seem to be working as expected. And I decided to rearrange the layout of the new links and accompanying icons, placing them at the top of the page rather than the side. I temporarily removed the Premium Galleries.
By today, I had completed the changes to make this ‘evolved’ design, which I made live. I carried out more testing and monitoring and found it was working OK.
The premium galleries will shortly be returning, accessed by contextualised links rather than a drop down menu.
Over the coming weeks, months and probably years, the site will evolve incrementally with small changes taking place here and there. I have learned that when you have a large website, it is often not a good idea to make a set of major changes all at the same time because if something has a negative effect, it’s difficult to find out what it is. A website is a kind of web application and should be developed in a similar way.
The aidan.co.uk site receives around 200,000 page views a month and appears in high positions in Google for a number of keywords. It was relaunched as a database site on 8 October 2003 and has been online continuously since 1997.
Tags: site changes, site design, website announcements, website design