John Hok dot Com

Let’s first take in a definition of both these words.

To revise something is “the act of changing, rearranging, adding and eliminating elements of a work with the goal of overall improvement of the piece”.

To redevelop something is “to knock everything down and start all over again”.

One of the things you might notice about the definition of revise is that the overall goal is for improvement. While to redevelop something is to knock it down and start again from scratch. Webmasters, web designers, and web developers all fall into either one of these categories. There are just some people who choose to redevelop something to improve it rather than revising it to improve something. I personally think that to revise your software, design, or website is better than doing an entire redevelopment.

I’ll outline the pros and cons of both revising and redeveloping so you can get an overall better idea of both these concepts and decide for yourself which is better.

Revising
Pros
- more targetted improvements
- possibly a greater number of overall improvements
- faster overall development time
- less chance of bugs and unexpected problems

Cons
- can get “messy” revising old code or websites
- possibly a perception of less improvements made in the eyes of visitors
- sometimes revising is not a viable option with bad code

Redeveloping
Pros
- the impression of more changes made
- a chance to start from scratch and not rely on an old backend or a dated design
- generally allows more flexibility in your changes
- easier to fix something that may not have been fixible through only small revisions

Cons
- much longer development time
- with entirely new code, you are increasing the likelyhood of introducing new bugs
- you erase all previous improvements and bugs you have fixed
- less proven design or code can lead to viewer confusion or “backlash” towards the new changes

As you can see both revising and redeveloping has their pros and cons. Some of the cons of redveloping have bigger implications such as development time because it reduces the amount of time you have to work on marketing your new changes. You generally decrease the amount of time you spend on your actual site because you are too focused on redeveloping the new design or system. It can be hard to rebuild the strength after such a long abscence for your site.

There are some situations where redeveloping is a more viable solution and there are other times when it is not. Redeveloping something allows you to lay down a new foundation for your project if the foundation was weak to begin with. Just like a house, your site needs a strong foundation and sometimes the only way to do this is to rebuild from scratch.

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