Redesign may be undertaken for many reasons. Perhaps the most common one is simply to give a site a new look - to 'freshen' it up. Internet users have a notoriously short attention span. Your site's design must be such that it holds their attention for long enough to convey your message.
Often redesign is required to keep up with ever changing technology and standards. A standards compliant site saves you time and money in the long run. Today, the major browsers support standards. However, the level of support for standards varies. Even so, support is growing and if your site supports standards, it will look and function identically in those browsers which support standards. Furthermore, the market share of browsers with good standards support is rising while that of those which do not is falling. Compare the rise in the popularity of Mozilla Firefox with the decline of Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Our first and biggest redesign project was for The Rona Gallery. The redesign was done to facilitate the Search Engine Optimisation of the site.
The original site was frames based. Frames make it difficult to optimise a site for searches. A redesign was called for.
We combined a successful Search Engine Optimisation excercise with a complete site redesign using modern standards (XHTML and CSS)
Another client, Gordon Chilvers, had a site that was not being indexed by Google. Effective Presence rebuilt the site to make it visible to search engines. Search for Gordon Chilvers or Stained Glass Design London and find Gordon's Stained Glass site on page one of Google.
All our technical work is done manually and is standards based. We write (XHTML, CSS, Java) code by hand.
Why is this important? Even today, with a plethora of Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) and code generators available, it is important to (at least) be capable of writing good code. If not, how can you expect to understand what a search engine robot sees when it crawls over your site? How can you make sure it sees what you want it to see?
Manually produced code is also a big advantage when it comes to maintenance. Many IDEs, when used in their visual development modes, produce code which is difficult to understand and modify.