Web site redesign diaries

Published on 2026-04-17 16:05

The current design of my website is couple of years old and no longer serves the purpose for which it was intended for. Out of the two, only the second one is a good reason to do drastic changes to my website. The first one would be a reason for small refresh.

At the moment there's almost everything on the home page. Professional posts, personal posts, vlogs, you name it. When I created that design the intention was to have it as my corner on the internet. In a way that’s a good intent.

Here comes the but. At this point in life I'd rather have a professional website where the main focal point will be my career around design, development and data viz. This is for me important because I've seen what visibility can do to careers.

This doesn't mean that other parts of me need to be deleted. On the contrary, my website is still my corner on the internet. What I'm doing is putting a store front before that corner, probably more like one main store front and several smaller ones for people seeking different version of myself. In a way it's what Stephanie Evergreen talks in her course as a hub approach.

What I am not sure about yet is how to get there. One option is to start redesigning the current theme and the other is to create one from scratch. There are benefits to both approaches.

Incremental changes

If I choose to redesign the current website the greatest advantage is having significant changes rolled out quickly and start building the momentum from there. Another advantage would be the ability to test those changes often which is how agile methodology got sold to management.

On the other hand if I do it incrementally, it might happen that for some time there will places on my website which will have both designs at the same time. This means that I'll have to maintain two designs until the last increment is done. And the completely worst thing that can happen is that when life happens, e.g. if I break both arms, my website will be stuck in the middle for a long time.

Big bang redesign

The biggest advantage of one big redesign is that I'll be able to work with a clean slate and won't need to care about anything else. As for the disadvantages, it's very similar to what would happen if life happened but way worse. If there's a need to stop working on the visuals, the new design might never get deployed.

At the end of the day, I need to get comfortable with either no changes in the design or incremental ones that might feel out of place. When looking at it from this point of view, incremental changes might be better for me.