You want to redesign that Web site, but the cash river of 1999 is a distant memory. Here's how to manage a redesign on the cheap.

你想重新设计自己的网站，但在1999年，网站重塑得不到足够的资金支持。没关系，下面就介绍利用低成本重塑网站的方法。

Web site redesign work has never attracted more interest. The recent boom has ensured that most of the Web sites that are needed have already gone up. The end of that boom has deadened any sense of urgency among organisations still planning their first site. And it's a rare Web site built in the past four years that couldn't use substantial improvement. So redesign is in vogue. When Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler published a new guide to Web site project management in August, they called it "Web Redesign: Workflow that Works" - misleading, but probably a sales winner.

以前，网站重塑并没有吸引人们的注意。它的出现使大多数已建立的网站得到了改进，也使正在建设网站的公司减少了紧迫感。我们知道过去4年里构建网站的成本非常高，但是那时并不能对其进行改进。因此现在网站重塑正在流行。Kelly Goto和Emily Cotler在8月份发表了网站项目管理的新方法，他们称之为“网站重塑”：改善结构，促进营销。

Finding the resources for a redesign takes more work than it used to, though. Increasing economic gloom and well-justified scepticism about IT spending are squeezing site budgets. Even at the wealthiest sites, managers are having to sub-let the in-house massage facilities to insolvency specialists just to fund a few more fancy graphics. How do you redesign in times like these?

然而，重塑网站的方案比以前复杂多了。经济的不景气，以及信息技术过高的费用，使此项预算费用越来越紧张。即使是财力最强的网站，也要把网站内部处理设备转租给那些破产的专家，只是为了多得到几张精美的图片。在这种年代，你打算如何重塑网站呢？

• Clarify your mission. Find out what the site's organisational sponsors expect it to do in the next year or two, and align your redesign to that mission. Chances are that the sponsors' ambitions are both clearer and more sober than they were way back in October 2000.
  
  明确任务。了解网站未来一两年的发展计划，围绕网站任务进行重新设计。现在，网站发起人的计划可能比2000年10月的时候更清楚也更现实了。
• Gather your data. A redesign has one great advantage over a greenfields site: users are already visiting it. They're carrying out transactions, leaving records in server logs, sending emails, talking to call-centre staff, commenting to management. You can find what's working and what's not. You can also put reliable figures on what it's costing. That frenzy of site-building between 1997 and 2000 was often justified as necessary experimentation. Now it's time to look at the results of the experiment, and keep looking at them.
  
  搜集资料。重塑网站比起构建网站，有一个优点：网站用户正在访问过这个网站。他们正在进行交易，正在服务器中留下某种记录，正在发邮件，正在投诉服务中心员工， 正在给网站管理提意见。你可以观察到网站哪部分运行良好，哪部分运行困难，甚至可以计算出具体的设计成本。时间证明，1997到2000年间，网站的迅速兴起是时代发展的需要。现在我们应该关注网站重塑是否适合时代发展的需要。
• Redesign by inches. The big, showy launch of a new design offers maximum risk and makes a big, sudden hole in the budget. A succession of smaller changes can be managed and measured more easily, and each success will earn you the right to make the next incremental improvement.
  
  重塑过程循序渐进。设计大型、浮华的网站会让预算严重超支，这对网站来说，是在冒险。我们首先尝试进行一系列小的改进，这样更容易成功，更容易达到标准。一步成功以后，你可以循序渐进地进行下一步的设计。
• Aim for provable short-term gains. For instance, work out how much you'd gain from site navigation improvements that led ten per cent more people to buy the site's most popular products or reach its most popular content. "The way to sell a year and a half ago was to talk about getting a return on your investment after 12 months or 18 months," reflects Netscape co-founder and current Loudcloud chairman Marc Andreessen in a recent New York Times article on corporate Web site spending. "Nowadays, the arguments have to do with cost reduction in the first month."
  
  注重短期实际效果。比如说，导航系统改进以后，网站可以吸引另外10%的客户购买网站最受欢迎的产品，或者是吸引他们浏览网站最受欢迎的内容，那你设计完成之后，这个目标完成了多少？Netscape的创始人之一、现任Loudcloud主席，Marc Andreessen，近来在《纽约时报》一篇介绍网站成本的文章中指出：“网站的销售方式，必须保证网站的投资在12到18个月之后有回报。现在讨论的焦点是如何在第一个月内降低成本。”
• Test key features of your redesign against what's there now. If you're promising ten per cent improvements in transaction rates, ensure the redesign achieves that. Even a half-dozen test runs with friends and volunteers off the street can suggest whether the new design improves noticeably on the old.
  
  测试改进后的网站经营效果。如果你的目标是提高十分之一的成交率，确保重新设计完之后，实现这个目标。即使是对朋友和志愿者作调查，也能测试出网站的改进效果。
• Trial your redesign. If you can, put a version of your planned changes in a corner of your site and track any changes in activity there.
  
  试验网站设计。如果可以，把一个重新设计好的版本放在网站的一个角落里，在运行中仔细测试每一个改进的部分。
• Find cheap wins. When a site-wide redesign is beyond your existing budget, adopt smaller projects which can produce demonstrable gains for minimal cost. They'll keep the momentum going within the site team and among the site's organisational backers.
  
  低成本，高回报。当网站重塑的成本超出预算时，寻找一个设计方法，利用最小的成本，设计出投资高回报的网站。
• Design for maintainability. New graphics on the site every week costing you a packet? Try replacing them with text-only displays in a new design, and monitor the results. (Swapping text for graphics has been an accepted strategy ever since IBM slashed graphics and download time and simplified navigation in its 1999 redesign - a project which allegedly helped boost sales 400 per cent.) Where you cannot give up GIFs and Flash files, consider a design which lets you automate their creation, using a database tool like Macromedia's Generator. In most cases, your redesign should allow just about every piece of site content to be generated from a well-designed database structure, even if it's generated merely as static HTML.
  
  考虑可维护性。网站每周的新图片成本很高吗？尝试用文本取代图片，然后观察效果。在1999年IMB公司重新设计网站的时候，大量消减图片的数量，提高了下载速度，并且使导航系统简单化，因此，销售量提高了400个百分点。如果网站的某个部分必须运用GIFs和Flash，可以考虑在设计中，利用Macromedia's Generator这样的数据库，使他们的创建自动化。在大多数情况下，设计好的数据库结构中要包括网站的每一部分内容，即使只能产生静态的HTML。

提高网站下载速度 数码摄影也是一门是艺术

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