Rebuild or iterate

As I said in yesterday's email, I'm discussing with a team how to implement their new website design.

Their website has been live for a couple of years, and now they want to refresh its look and feel.

The current theme includes a lot of technical debt and legacy code, such as using an older CSS framework and build tools that need unsupported versions of packages to compile it and generate the scripts and stylesheets.

There are two ways they could approach this:

They could continue to iterate on the current theme, making and releasing small changes to move forward in small steps and slowly repaying the technical debt.

Alternatively, they could create a new theme from scratch.

This would allow them to start with new build tools, a modern CSS framework and small and simple stylesheets.

Here's the thing

There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches.

Iterating on the original theme allows for continuous improvement, but it would take longer to remove the old frameworks and build tools - if that would be possible at all.

Rebuilding and re-inventing would mean immediately avoiding the technical debt and legacy tools, but it comes with its own risks, and you'd need to wait until the whole theme was completed before it could be launched.

There isn't a right and wrong answer, and it will depend on the thoughts and objectives of the team and business.