Well, all of my old posts are now offi­cially gone *cries a river*  oh well… here’s my first post… again… the tweets don’t count :P

My boss has a thing about revamp­ing the site once a year… his logic is that the cus­tomers need to relearn the nav­i­ga­tion so that they might dis­cover new things… I guess he really doesn’t like the idea of “Don’t make me think”.  Any­ways, that made me pon­der how long should a home­page be revamped?  Once a year seems a bit exces­sive to me, and I have noticed that sites like Intel / AMD had not updated their web­site for at least 2–3 years.  Now, there are many rea­sons why a web­site stays the way it is for a few year, I think these are the factors:

1. Con­fu­sions – new look dri­ves lots of habit based cur­rent readers/customers/clients absolutely nuts.  Every year after the revamp­ing, we got lots of emails and calls regard­ing the web­site that the cus­tomers claimed that they can’t find their things any­more.  Actu­ally, the cus­tomers mostly freaked out at the home­page, but the rest of the page, the nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem is pretty much the same with minor changes.  Yet, “he” per­sisted that we change every year, actu­ally, the new look only hit the 6 months mark… luck­ily, I ‘m not the one who answer those emails and calls
2. Resources - it takes time to come up with a good design and resources to build it.  Did I men­tion I’m a one per­son graphic / web depart­ment?  I don’t know how big is Intel & AMD’s web team, but pretty sure more than 1 per­son.  I am imag­in­ing that they study back and forth of all the nav­i­ga­tion and lay­out make sure that they don’t freak their cus­tomers out when they whip out the new look.  That, I am judg­ing by their nav­i­ga­tion and lay­out.  Intel has the most sig­nif­i­cant change on the home­page since last year, but after the home­page Intel keeps the nav­i­ga­tion pretty much the same.  AMD also keeps the same nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem and every­thing pretty much the same but with an updated look.

I mean, my boss has a point fresh­en­ing the nav­i­ga­tion, although, with the “Don’t make me think” prin­ci­ple… Well, let me know what you think?

Some 2009 updated cor­po­rate web­sites, I do a lot of cor­po­rate designs, so here’s a ref­er­ence for myself and any­one else find use­ful.  Some­one posted 35 2008 pro­fes­sional cor­po­rate web­sites, I’m updat­ing the list, added and sub­tract a few and keep on col­lect­ing: Orig­i­nal article

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