Web design tip - Maintain consistency in time and space

I love BBC news. They are fast, reliable and mostly impartial. That is what you expect from a news provider. But sometimes you just hate their news website. Its design gets frequently modified. And always someone is experimenting with its design. They say it is for better user experience. But it leaves frequent visitors like me in a strange place. If it was not for their contents, I would not have visited them again.

Consitency in time
A website is like a library or supermarket. You change the order of things one day and your frequent visitors would lose their track. They feel they are in a strange place. Just like a supermarket, you change the arrangements drastically and you lose your customers.

So maintain a constant design every day, and your frequent visitors would feel at home.

Consistency in space
You also need to maintain a single design across your site. All webpages should be visually related to each other. A single design acts as an invisible link for your entire site.

Exceptions
There could be cases where you might have to make some exceptions. If you want to do a complete makeover of your site, try doing them in smaller pieces at long intervals. This will make the changes unnoticeable. Also in some cases you might want to have some pages look different from other pages. Example - your front page looks different than your inner pages. But make sure that it still follows a common pattern so that the visual link is not broken.