Yes, I know I'm repeating myself, I know I mentioned this in Begin at the Beginning, but it is worth repeating (and if you haven't read that article it may be a good idea to do so now, since all the principles that you should apply to your design should also be applied to your redesign). Simply put, if your site has an integrated look and feel it will save you a lot of grief when it comes to redesigning the whole thing.

What this means is that sometimes, if you are lucky and you have a solid original design, you may be able to redesign your entire site without touching a single character of your HTML code. How?

Well, if you have just one or two backgrounds, you could simply replace those graphics with different ones that have the same names. This goes a long way toward changing the look of the entire site, and it is far more readily apparent than a thorough reorganization. And if that is not enough, you can also replace some of your other graphics being very careful not to modify their sizes using this same principle.

This one can be a little dangerous if you don't know what you are doing, but it is an essential one: get a good batch-replace program, sooner or later you are going to need it.

A couple of examples of why this is so useful: say you have 100 pages on your website, and your formerly free email provider suddenly decides to charge you a rather hefty fee, or it disappears altogether, replacing all the links to your email is bound to be a tedious, time-consuming and boring task, not to mention that you can be almost certain that you'll miss a couple of instances. A batch replace program takes care of this task in a matter of seconds and makes no mistakes (of course, a typo here could be a problem, but another batch replace would solve it).

Another example, far more delicate, is replacing one color with another throughout your site (you know, that cryptic combination of six characters/numbers that tells a browser that #003399 is blue but #FF0000 is red). It may seem unlikely, but in fact if you replace your backgrounds changing colors may be necessary.

If you are going to use a program like this to replace colors you have to make sure there are absolutely NO instances of a particular color you don't want to replace. These programs are useful, but not smart

This one obviously applies only if your site uses frames, but it is one of the easiest and most effective things you can do if you are going to be handling your code in a more intimate fashion.

If you use a frameset that includes a navigation bar, you can move it to a different location and you can also modify its design. It takes only a few minutes and the results can be surprising. You don't have to touch the body of your main pages, they will fall into place on their own, and that's the beauty of it.

If your site does not use frames and there is a serious problem that forces you to make a more profound change (or if you just have to add a new section to your site), then you must be very patient, since changes will have to be, at least partially, handmade. In these instances the best you could do is try to use cut & paste as much as possible.

If you can, generate a template of the changes you need to make, copy it and paste it to each one of the pages in which it is necessary. Some professional batch replace programs may enable you to automate this process, of course, but they require the code to be replace to be identical in all documents, and they don't allow you fine tune the changes to each in each page (for example, in the case of a navigation bar, if you have disabled the link to the page you are in, then the batch replace process won't recognize the code as matching the established parameter, nor will it know enough to disable the link to the page it's in after it is pasted).

In these instances sort your documents by "last modified", so that you can recognize the pages that have been corrected from those that are left to correct, make yourself a very large pot of coffee, and get comfortable because chances are you'll be there for a while.

Having a site that uses frames is no warranty that this won't ever happen, but it does significantly reduce the likelihood of it.

Treat your homepage as your home. It's your site, move the furniture around, play with it, who knows, you may stumble upon an unexpectedly successful layout. Remember that whatever changes you make only show up on your own computer until you decide to upload the new design. Having said that KEEP A BACKUP (or two), don't make any changes that can't be undone, and make sure everything is working the way it should be before you upload. Error 404 is not your friend.