One of my ongoing projects is to help out with my parents’ web site, www.kindredlearning.com. We sell home school and family curriculum, books, projects, and supplies. The site has a very loyal following of repeat customers, and it helps my parents to serve other families and to earn a little money on the side.

As you can see, the web site itself needs a little help. It’s still using the same template that I made for it in an afternoon nearly 3 years ago. The site is also hosted with a company that provides a WYSIWYG editor, but this editor is very clumsy and slow, and it severely constrains your access to resources to “keep you from messing things up.” For example, we don’t have access to an FTP server, there are no server-side includes of any sort, and it’s impossible to override the CSS that’s built into the system. The list goes on and on.

We decided not long ago that, since our knowledge of search engine optimization and web design are drastically greater than when we first started the site, we are going to switch hosting and redesign the web site.

Web Site Redesign

What’s it take to redesign a web site? I have a long list of things I know that I will have to change. There are also a lot of things that I’m sure we’ll find out along the way.

Because nearly every company will have to perform a web site redesign at some time, I’m going to try and document the whole process of rebuilding Kindred Learning’s site from the ground up so that you can learn from my mistakes and successes and get your web site redesign right.

I’m going to create a new category of posts specifically for web site redesign projects and discussions. Check out “Web Site Redesign” for my posts and progress redesigning Kindred Learning and other sites.