As an online business, your website is your storefront.  As such, you need to keep it fresh and interesting in order to attract and keep customers.  Discretion is the better part of valor, though.  When altering your webpage, make sure the changes are customer-centered and done for a good reason.

It can be really annoying to go to one of your favorite websites and they’ve changed everything.  You can’t find any of the usual features you regularly check, and the new look is often full of application-heavy features that take forever to load.

I often ask myself, “what was the point of these changes?”  It feels like websites sometimes completely revamp their designs with an eye towards keeping their web designer employed.

The central issue, and this applies especially to you as an online business, is that the new design and its implementation are not there for the users’ needs.  Whatever these people were thinking, it wasn’t about customer convenience and loyalty.

As an online business, your website is your storefront.  Think about that.  If you had a brick-and-mortar storefront, it would change—probably frequently.  The window fronts are valuable real estate used to promote seasonal specials, sales, new merchandise, and so on.

You probably wouldn’t, however, frequently smash your building to bits and reconstruct it in a new architectural style with all the doors and windows in different places.

The same is true of your website.  You should design it from the point of view of making the customer’s experience easy, welcoming, and pleasant.  It should by no means be stagnant—you’ll want to feature your best sales and newest merchandise—but each incarnation of your site needn’t be a radical new departure.

And when you do make big changes to your website, make sure you have a clear, well-considered, customer-centered reason for doing so.

In general, frequent, small changes to your website are preferable to sudden, periodical overhauls.  Navigational tools, like where to go to see the catalog, where to go to buy something, or where to go to ask a question about a product, should be stable.

The look of the links or the buttons may change to reflect a new “paint job” on your storefront.  But, if your customers are used to moving to the upper right hand corner of your homepage to check their shopping cart, for instance, the location of that function shouldn’t change, even if the look of the shopping cart link does.

If you do have the creative urge to play around frequently with web design, indulge yourself!  Your cheap reliable web hosting probably offers you enough storage to run multiple web pages.  Have you got a special sale coming up, or a great new promotion, or an exciting new product?  Why not create a special landing page for it?

The individual landing pages for various specials and promotions should vary widely from your main homepage.  You can have fun and experiment with new looks, navigation, and functionality, while still keeping your home page stable.  Sequential autoresponders can be used to share links to special landing pages with your regular and preferred customers.

This, combined with your subtly and sensibly evolving homepage, will keep a nicely varied, attractive set of views presented regularly to your customers, who will not feel lost when they return to your homepage to shop.

And when you ask yourself “how to make my own website”, you can reflect on your creativity, imagination, forethought, planning, and common sense.

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