We have a 60 or so page website with several CMS collections which has been live for several years now and we would like to roll out a new design. We have the new site design complete in Figma and now it’s time to build.
When it comes to a redesign for one’s own website, are there any best practices on the best approach or recommendations for either;
Building the new site from scratch in a new webflow page
vs.
Building the new site pages within the old site and then transition them
The thought of starting from a ‘blank slate’ in webflow is a bit daunting seeing how much content we have added to our current site over the last several years. It seems a monumental task. This may just be unnecessary baggage due to the work to come building the new site.
Because of this I was toying with building the new site pages/design within the existing live website, have them as draft and then just publish the new pages when complete and delete or draft the old pages. This may not be realistic and could be a complete mess. Also thinking it may not work simply because if we plan to change style sheets globally this might change the ‘live’ site while we’re building the new.
Maybe I have answered my own question but was looking for other people’s experiences.
Hey @Nicole_Mauriello, in this case, I would consider how the CSS handled on the current site. Are you using any libraries/frameworks?
I am for creating it on a new project with dummy content, ensuring that the classes are labeled clearly as new so that copy-pasting it to the current site will be cleaner. This way you can transition new pages as your team builds the other pages without worrying too much about other elements breaking.
Thank you denny, we’re still growing our skill level with webflow so I’m afraid our current site is a bit rough. We did use a template we purchased which had a lot of features/functions we did not use. Our plan is to create a style guide first and use those styles globally if that is what you mean by libraries/frameworks.
I think going with a new project is the way to go. I appreciate your feedback.
I think going with a new project is definitely the way to go to clean up things from the previous theme which undoubtedly is adding some bloat. Not to mention I’d wager you know more now than when you were working on the original site so you’ll probably solve design problems more efficiently.
If you’re still researching how to proceed, I’d strongly recommend checking out Finsweet’s “Client First” system and starter template:
It’s got its own style guide built in that you can use to start things out, plus a very human-readable approach to class naming/structure that you can reference in their extensive documentation:
