The Life of a Website Design

Here’s a question I want to throw out here and will appreciate any and all opinions. Non-blog Brad and I were discussing church websites this morning and we have differing opinions. To present this in an unbiased way, I won’t say what side we are each on but here is the question:

• What is the life of a website design?

In other words, how often does the design need to be redone to keep it fresh?

On one hand, you look at Yahoo! or Google and there design has not changed in years, yet they still draw the crowds. Yet I know others that will say you need to redesign your site at least once a year.

I was on a church website committee about 4-5 years ago(trust me, my committee days are long behind me now) and we were responsible for defining our content and that kind of thing. We hired an outside company to design it and we as a committee agreed that the design needed to be redone once a year. However, I left that church shortly after that, I think even before we got around to actually having our website online, since the committee crawled along at a snails pace, but I have kept tabs on that site. It maintained the same original design, with the same candid pics of members with children etc and seriously, in the last few months, the site has now been totally redone. Way overdue, in my opinion, espcially considering kids and babies pictured on the site were now 4-5 years older.

So now, the current debate is between whether a church site should be redesigned every one year or every two years. Also, how does a site like Google or Yahoo! get away with maintaining the same look for years, yet we still keep going back? I have opinions on this but I wanna see what some others think first, so let me know!