The term “redesign” is heard quite a lot in any creative agency setting. But what is a redesign really? Is it simply giving the current site a facelift, or does it imply starting over completely from scratch?
From my perspective, an organization should undergo a redesign for the right reasons. Maybe your content doesn’t answer your users’ questions, the design was built from a desktop-first perspective or the backend architecture is unmanageable, for example.
In this case, the staff at IdeaBase (a student-powered design agency run through Kent State University's College of Communication and Information) faced a similar decision with our own internal agency website. Our site had spent nearly 5 years in a WordPress-powered site and it used a modified purchased theme that had seen few content improvements over the years. Was it time to redesign from the ground up? How would we counsel clients who were in the same situation?