Run a web shop long enough and you stop seeing websites as launches. You see them as generations — because at Live Web Studios, plenty of client sites have been rebuilt three or four times since 2004. Watching what survives each rebuild and what gets thrown away is its own education.
What gets thrown out every time
- The clever stuff. Flash intros, carousels, parallax everything, whatever widget was fashionable. Every generation's decoration is the next generation's demolition.
- Design built around a trend instead of the business. If the look came from an awards gallery instead of the customer's question, it ages in dog years.
- Anything that requires a manual. Features the owner never learned to update die quietly, then get deleted loudly.
What survives every rebuild
- The words. Clear descriptions of what the business does, for whom, at what service area — written once, polished for years. Content outlives every coat of paint.
- The domain and its history. Age, links, and a clean record are compound interest. (It's also why moving hosts carelessly is so expensive.)
- The phone number placement. Every redesign, the contact path gets one tap shorter. It never gets longer.
- Speed. The fast site survives; the heavy one gets rebuilt. No exception in twenty years.
The musician's version
It's the same lesson the stage teaches: arrangements change, the song remains. A redesign should be a new arrangement of material that was worth keeping — and if the material isn't worth keeping, the redesign isn't the problem.
The sites that last aren't the ones that impressed other designers at launch. They're the ones that kept answering the customer's question, generation after generation.