How to get rebuilding versus refreshing right
Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. The short answer to rebuilding versus refreshing is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
Why this earns attention
A rebuild is not always the answer. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- If the structure is sound, styling and content may be enough
- Rebuild when the platform blocks what you need to do
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
Rebuild when the platform blocks what you need to do. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
What to do next
What this looks like day to day
The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Three things worth confirming about rebuilding versus refreshing before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Rebuild when the platform blocks what you need to do — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.