[thelist] How often to redesign

[Paola Kathuria]

travis forden wrote:
> Jennifer wrote:
> >Web site: http://www.mif.com - "keep it interesting".
> 
> i don't know if the site still does it, but webcrawler (www.webcrawler.com)
> used to change the site around a little for different holidays. the
> masthead would acquire spiders and pumpkins at halloween, turkeys and
> pumpkins for thanksgiving, etc. i found this to be pretty cool.

I was going to suggest something like this too.  Yahoo (I think) and
Google (definitely) have holiday/seasonal graphics.  The user-interface
remains the same but the logo/buttons are embelished (and thus still
recognisable).  As others have said, regularly redesigning the
whole user-interface will likely be confusing and annoying to regular
visitors.

Google only do it with their logo (probably because it's the
really their only site graphic and have archived them on a
charming page: http://www.google.com/holidaylogos.html

The trick is to make the graphics which vary have the same filename
and pixel dimensions as the normal graphics so that no pages/templates
have to be changed when you copy them into the graphics dir on the
web site.

Perhaps another way of making things interesting is to include
personalisation and/or customisation features.  I had a play with
"Yahoo! Groups" this weekend; you can choose design themes (change
colours and graphical buttons) or simple colour schemes, as well
as change page layout (number and position of columns) and content
(add/remove "modules").  See http://my.yahoo.com/?myHome

Other ways of engaging visitors is to offer some content in e-mail
form, for instance if you have regular features or a notification
service if that is appropriate for your content.


Paola