Louis Rosenfeld outlines his case for killing website redesign – or at least changing your way of doing it – in a recent webmaster forum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His Redesign Must Die talk is available on slideshare (audio not available). Rosenfeld has a library background and is the co-author of the the often cited Information Architecture and the World Wide Web. Additional presentations from Rosenfeld found here.
Oh god. If I could only send that presentation back in time, before our university replaced its CMS and forced redesigns with strict templates on every department and service… thanks for the link, George!
We’re in the midst of a web redesign effort over here to support the new CLF 2.0 regulations amongst other reasons – like so many redesigns before.
It seems that every 2-3 years there’s a big “redesign” effort on some or all of our sites. I wish that effort could be directed toward improving our tools/services/data instead of changing the interface yet again. Or at least I wish that it could be done more organically – as opposed to a single big thrust effort.
When did the web interface become the most expensive part of our technology implementation? Perhaps it always was….