A friend of mine who is a long time web developer took it upon himself to critique a website that I manage. He instantly went for the obvious insults. I see you have a left side navigation but the site is centered. Is that table layouts??? It was just so dang obvious. Of coarse I know that CSS layout is cooler and more versatile. I realize I could be serving a layout based on the users browser and screen resolution. But here the thing. Im from the old school. If you are ranking well in the search engines and almost all of your new business is based on those rankings then you DONT MESS WITH IT!!!!!! When I started working on this site a few years ago they had just lost 70% of their traffic in a botched full site redesign. I came aboard and optimized the site and even went back and put up some 301 redirects where the old pages were. Traffic came back with our new high rankings. It was also more qualified traffic. The old site was very text rich and they got plenty of traffic from people searching for very general consumer products which we didnt sell. So here we are a coupla years later. Uniques are higher than ever. I realize one day that I will come in one morning and traffic will be low and I will find out that Google has changed its algorithm in an unfavorable way for us and I will once again be stalking the top spots. Maybe at that point I will be willing to take a chance on a site redesign so I can escape the ridicule of my techie friend.
