Change is a constant phenomenon in this world. People always look for new and fresh things. The external environment is changing rapidly. We need to adapt to the changing atmosphere, otherwise we will stay behind. This fact is equally appropriate for large number of websites, particularly for those websites that have been in business for a prolonged period of time. It is natural for website owners to be tempted regarding altering the overall appearance and different mechanisms of their websites. This temptation may arise from several reasons such as changes in your preferences and purposes.

Altering your site design may be your choice. But your site’s loyal visitors may think otherwise. But they have a valid reason to think so. The reason is over a period of time they have been using your site and are well-versed with all the nooks and corners of your site. So implementing a new design may put them off. But it doesn’t mean that you can not the change the design. You can surely do that by mitigating the problems of your regular users. Do not make any radical changes in your site as far as the navigation system is concerned. Place your navigation buttons at their standard positions for the ease of your users. This is a general practice to keep your navigation menu bars either on the left or right side or at the top or bottom of your website. There is no hard and fast rule regarding the placements of your navigation bars. But your loyal visitors will be less irritated to find the elements at their usual places. So you need to be careful about the user-friendliness of your site. As a result, your potential customers will stay with you and new customers will keep pouring in.

You may also feel the need for changing the way you have been organizing your certain files in a specific directory or you may also want to alter the filenames of your web pages so that they represent their contents in a better manner. But you may lose out on popularity of your web pages by changing your URLs and site structure as search engines will remove your old web pages from their database. You will have to start from scratch to occupy a higher search engine ranking. There is a solution for this problem. All you need to do is to redirect all requests from the old pages to the new ones. Apart from adding a link on the old page redirecting to the new, you also need to inform search engines and visitors that there is a new location for your old page.

There is a relatively easier task at hand as far as altering the overall appearance of your site. If you are using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), then you only require modifying the CSS file and it is implemented throughout the site. So you get rid of the cumbersome task of modifying each page on your site.

It is always recommended to keep a latest backup copy of your existing website. You never know, it may be required in the future. If your site redesigning simply backfires, you can quickly return to your old design. So watch out for all those facts before embarking on your website redesign.

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