I just did it. The night, 31st of January to first of February, I updated the design of my blog to the now new and online version 2.4 which manly is an update of validity in standards (xHtml and CSS), jQuery effects and a better compatibility between different browsers. Well some are not yet completely ready – I hate IE6. But why now? That’s the thing.

The Why

I’m a web-developer and designer which means – for me – that I can’t just let the design like it is now and am constantly improving my website theme – even if I should be doing other things. I just can’t let it look the same if I get a new idea, I just have to implement the thoughts. That’s manly the reason why I updated the site’s theme.

The Way I did it

Reading many different blogs, I learned that you risk loosing readers which come to your site constantly. New readers will see the new and just don’t care. But for the constant readers it can be hard to see your site change completely one day to the other, which means, it is much easier to through little changes out than a big update, moving all objects and change the colors, which was never my thought cause I’m happy with the design like it is now.

Thinking about not updating with one big update rather than pumping out little changes. I decided to updated my local copy, giving me a deadline in which the update should be ready. I started updating my local copy, thinking about the changes, updating again and looking at it again. Some days before the update went live, I stopped implementing new things and just got rid of all this validity errors and browser compatibility problems. After all the little update which hit the ground at Sunday morning was ready 2 days earlier than I thought – which never hurts!

I think this milestone updating of a website is much better than just sending out updates when they hit you and you just implemented the new ideas into your local copy. You never know which problems that update will bring you, or if you really like it.

Final Thoughts

I’m now planing on getting other projects done. At this blog I now want to focus on writing posts rather than updating the design. Following the advise which is spread at many places from various people: “Content is King”

I hope you like the changes – even if they are a little hard to spot. If you have some thoughts about it or have an additional thought about updating a web-site, please leave a comment.