Website redesign and design system

A redesign is most often ordered with the sentence „we do not like it any more”. That is a legitimate reason, but a weak one on its own — a site that looks dated and brings in enquiries is still better than a site that looks modern and brings in nothing. So it starts with an audit, not with new graphics.

What deserves to stay

Every old website has something that works: a subpage people reach from search, a form they actually write through, a piece of text that answers a question clients really have. The first thing is to find out what that is and not throw it away.

The second thing is the opposite: find the pages nobody opens and do not carry them over into the redesign. A site with sixty subpages and traffic on seven of them does not need sixty subpages redesigned.

Why a design system and not just new graphics

Graphics can be drawn for ten pages. Then comes the eleventh, which nobody drew, and someone puts it together by eye. After a year the site has three shades of the same colour, four heading sizes and two different buttons.

A design system is a list of decisions nobody has to make again: what the colours are and when each one is used, what a second-level heading looks like, what a button looks like on hover, when it is disabled and when it returns an error. Those states are exactly what plain graphics leave out, and the developer then adds them as he sees fit.

Contrast is not a matter of taste

Light grey text on white looks elegant on a designer’s screen. On a laptop in an office by the window you cannot read it. So colour pairs are not guessed — they are calculated against WCAG, and body text has to have a ratio of at least 4.5:1.

This is not about standards for the sake of standards. It is about the fact that a large share of visitors are over forty and read on a phone outdoors.

What happens to search rankings

If the addresses do not change, nothing. If they have to change, permanent 301 redirects are set up and the search engine moves what it knows about the site over to the new addresses. The problem only arises when the addresses change and nobody sets up the redirects — then the site drops out of the results and it takes months to come back.