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Why I haven’t ‘redesigned my portfolio’ since 2014

Posted in Design

There seems to be a bit of a thing in the web design community where we redesign our websites every couple of years. Well, I have a confession: it’s July 2020 and I haven’t redesigned my website since 2014.

Well, that’s not strictly true. The design has had almost constant attention since then, but in small, iterative ways rather than wholesale, high-impact redesign.

This is partly because I haven’t rebranded, but mainly because I don’t see the point if it’s not absolutely necessary. Wholesale redesign:

  • from concept to coding, is a lot of work
  • can prove disorienting for returning visitors
  • can cause usability issues that will need to be addressed
  • can cause accessibility issues that will need fixing

That said, fair play to you if you have the time and inclination – it can be fun and it’s great to see write-ups of the design rationale and development challenges faced.

For me, though, I’ll keep on iterating.

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More posts

Here are a couple more posts for you to enjoy. If that’s not enough, have a look at the full list.

  1. Alt text for CSS generated content

    There’s an interesting feature in Safari 17.4 that allows content added with CSS to have ‘alt’ text. I’m not sure how I feel about this.

  2. The accessibility conversations you want to be having

    In most companies, accessibility conversations centre around WCAG compliance, but that’s just the start. Thinking beyond that is where you want to be!