How long has it been since you've redesigned one of your websites?

[MichaelCorfman]

Last week Buzzy shared that he hates change, especially when it comes to web redesigns. Buzzy said Linda Holmes at National Public Radio summed up his feelings perfectly in the following quote:

I stumble through many, many sites every day. I have routines; I hit buttons in a certain order; I know where everything is. Even if your site navigation requires me to click three times to get to what I want, once I learn where those clicks are, I can do them one-handed with my eyes closed. (And if it's early enough and it's before coffee, I just might do it.)

But, as both Linda Holmes and Buzzy agree, you do get used to changes (if they are changes for the better - or at least not changes for the worse - you can see the post here: NPR's Linda Holmes addresses why we hate web redesigns).

So, for this weeks poll question I thought I'd ask about web redesigns. How long has it been since you've done one. But, besides answering the poll question, be sure to share what motivated the change in the first place, whether you were happy with the result, and perhaps most importantly, do you think the change has increased traffic or revenue?

Michael

[baldidiot]

At the moment it's been a while since I've done any major design changes to a site, but when I first started I constantly fiddled with it.

Having said that, I have a sleeper site that in the past couple of months has jumped up in the serps which I'm considering making look a bit prettier - but that'll be purely cosmetic changes all done by editing the css file (ie: no structural changes).

[Christiaan]

My site is only 1 year old so I didn't do any major redesign yet. But I do small changes all the time. Since my site is only 1 year I still need to optimize it more and more.
As I learn new things (from GPWA) I get new ideas and make changes to my site.

[ricmarg]

We do it once about once each year.
We like to keep up with the new trends and good ideas.
We're never afraid to re-design and do A/B tests on our pages.

[edgarf76]

I just redid one with a new theme and am working on re doing others currently. The motivation came from wanting them to be mobile friendly and also look a lot better.

[TravG]

I am forever changing my sites. While some are just minor tweaks, color changes, small layout changes etc, I "play around" with how my websites look on a regular basis.

I did just do a pretty big overhaul on one of my main websites just about 3 months ago. The site was growing leaps and bounds and when the growth started to level off and even become flat I felt it was time for a change. Happy to say since the change traffic has increased and back to positive growth month over month. The increase (in my opinion) is probably partly because of the new design but also by doing a pretty big overhaul google started crawling my site at about twice the rate. So some of that traffic increase is probably because as we all know Google likes change and crawled the site more and hence probably sent more traffic. I can always see a coorelation between crawl rate and overal site traffic.