I recently asked a question on LinkedIn asking

“What do you consider to be essentials criteria for a web redesign and how do you test these criteria for effectiveness in producing a successful site?”

I was interested to see how the wider professional community saw the subject of successful web design, what where the points that needed to be addressed and even what did people consider to be ‘design’.

I know when I use design in reference to a project I mean the information, the structure and the function of the site, but others think code, or images or possibly something else.

The answers I got where all extremely well thought out, eloquent and I couldn’t argue with any of the points put forward, mainly because the respondents where answering from the point of view some focused on code or user testing or graphics, some even looked site visits as their metric and all fit the bill, but none focused on the structure of the content, the architecture.

One answer caught my eye from AZHAR SAEED in Toronto,

ESTHETICS is the key.
UPDATED INFO most important.
SEAMLESS is the skill.

Well kinda, structure is the key, findabilty the ease with which the visitor can locate the site and its contents, the aesthetics of a site is in reality secondary, if you can't find the content then it amtters little how it looks...

It’s the simplicity of the answer that caught my eye; he managed to answer a deceptively complicated question in 3 lines! Wonderful!  The simplicity of structure the answer is itself uses indicates a key point of all web design, If only all answers was as simple.

In short I guess there is no one right answer to a successful web site (re) design, there are however many many wrong ones.