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Top 10 Biggest Website Redesigns of All Time

Posted September 11, 2009 in Showcase, Web Design

Top 10 Website Redesigns In honor of the new FreelanceFolder redesign, we decided to create a list of the top 10 most beautiful, most dramatic, and some cases just biggest website redesigns we could find. Some of these designs showcase monumental leaps in design, whereas others portray a more subdued and calculated approach to redesigning a major website.

Let’s take a look at the list:

#10. Yahoo

After going through a number of big redesigns over the years, Yahoo has found itself in one of the most difficult positions it has ever faced. This new redesign represents a serious effort to help stem the long, slow slide into obscurity.

Old Design:
Yahoo's Old Design

New Design:
Yahoo's New Design

 

#9. Amazon

Amazon is one of those companies that redesigns on a daily basis, so it’s sometimes difficult to even tell when they’ve made a big design change. That said, there was a really big step a few years ago when Amazon made the move from flat buttons to the new rounded interface we are used to today.

Old Design:
amazon-old

New Design:
amazon-new

 

#8. LinkedIn

Always a foundational website in the social media world, representing professionals and business, LinkedIn has never really found the same growth as the more personal and interactive websites. This redesign represents a few small steps in that direction — toward interactivity — along with a number of important usability enhancements.

Old Design:
linkedin-old

New Design:
linkedin-new

 

#7. Facebook

This redesign is here not because it is visually dramatic, but because Facebook is the second highest trafficked website in the world, and even layout changes like this are enormous when you consider how many users they effect. Not to mention, it seems every time Facebook redesigns something there is an enormous outcry from users, both positive and negative.

Old Design:
facebook-old

New Design:
facebook-new

 

#6. Ebay

Even though they are well past their gloried-times, Ebay is still a major player on the internet. Over the past several years they have been tweaking and adjusting their homepage for maximum impact and usability. I think it is actually getting better.

Old Design: ebay-old

New Design: ebay-new

 

#5. Whitepages.com

Much less popular than many of the pages in this list, Whitepages.com is still fairly large compared to most sites. Combine that with a substantial (and expensive) redesign, and they come in at number five.

Old Design: whitepages-old

New Design: whitepages-new

 

#4. MySpace

Despite losing to Facebook in the website battle of the century, MySpace has shown that they are still capable of growth and improvement. This redesign is an example of them flexing some design muscle.

Old Design: myspace-old

New Design: myspace-new

 

#3. WordPress.org

In a list about redesigns it would be practically criminal to leave out the web platform that designers love most. The homepage of WordPress.org hasn’t changed much over the years, but their last redesign seriously improved the looks of the site and helped bring them inline with modern styles.

Old Design:
wordpress-old

New Design:
wordpress-new

 

#2. Twitter.com

From a company that seems only capable of angering its users with change, this was actually one major redesign that everyone seemed to love. Not only is this a visually impressive change, it also represents a fundamental shift in focus of the company towards search.

Old Design:
twitter-old

New Design:
twitter-new

 

#1. Whitehouse.gov

Nevermind the cultural and other changes that are associated with this site, from a purely visual standpoint this is a striking redesign of one of the world’s most heavily trafficked websites.

Old Design:
whitehouse-old

New Design:
whitehouse-new

 

More Web Design Resources from FreelanceFolder

If you like this list of website redesigns, you might also enjoy these other web design posts from FreelanceFolder:

What do you think?

Did we miss any major redesigns? Do you disagree with any of the choices showcased here?

Let us know in the comments!

Related posts:

  1. 30+ Examples of Big, Bold, and Beautiful Website Navigation Menus
  2. How You Know When Your Website Design is Finished
  3. Create a Clean Modern Website Design in Photoshop
  4. 9 Of The Best Ways To Present A Website To A Client
  5. Web Design Inspiration – 27 Dark Website Designs Part II

About the author: Mason Hipp is a designer, entrepreneur, and writer. He is co-author of the Book The Unlimited Freelancer, and has just recently launched a collection of premium graphic resources for web designers called MediaLoot. Follow him on twitter @MasonHipp



 
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67 Comments
  • User Gravatar
    divinefusion
    September 11th, 2009 at 12:30 pm

    Great collection. These are great examples of the change in ‘web’ times and it shows that successful companies are designing forward : )

  • User Gravatar
    Shevonne
    September 11th, 2009 at 12:33 pm

    Love this! It’s always great to see how sites have evolved throughout the years.

  • User Gravatar
    Tyler
    September 11th, 2009 at 12:37 pm

    These are really great.

    The white house is definitely one of the most impressive changes.

    The new postal service site at http://www.usps.com is a pretty amazing upgrade as well.

  • User Gravatar
    simply life
    September 11th, 2009 at 1:15 pm

    A great collection. The prominent changes are marked. A few have changed their layout since you collected them.

  • User Gravatar
    Dustin Lakin
    September 11th, 2009 at 1:38 pm

    Great list, its amazing how much better everything looks now. Will be interesting to see how the big websites will look in 10 years. Thanks for the post.

  • User Gravatar
    dp
    September 11th, 2009 at 1:47 pm

    The white house one is interesting. A better design for a better administration. However, I would have added an accent of red here and there instead of the orange. Red, white and blue, get it? ;)

  • User Gravatar
    simplee
    September 11th, 2009 at 7:21 pm

    Change is good!

  • User Gravatar
    Jerome Pettiford
    September 11th, 2009 at 10:55 pm

    I think you got all the good ones.

  • User Gravatar
    Semblance
    September 12th, 2009 at 8:22 am

    To me the most significant redesign is http://www.bbc.co.uk – screen shots of the previous design can be viewed here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2008/03/refreshing_changes.html

  • User Gravatar
    Láďa Durchánek
    September 12th, 2009 at 12:02 pm

    Apple redesign from old glossy look is also mentionable. Current Apple website is one of the most polished designs.

  • User Gravatar
    Lorne Pike
    September 12th, 2009 at 4:47 pm

    I agree with Lád’a that Apple was worthy of note. Another very significant change came just yesterday with Ecademy. While not well known in North America, it is a very well known social media site elsewhere. They completely revitaized their look, and jumped from an exceptionally old interface to a much more friendly and modern look. Kudos to them, and to you for this post. Thanks!

  • User Gravatar
    Fernando Emmanoel Borba
    September 12th, 2009 at 5:05 pm

    What a great list. But I would change the list a bit. The best “extreme makeover” goes to.. Twitter.

  • User Gravatar
    Jal
    September 12th, 2009 at 5:37 pm

    These are very good transformations of websites that you showcased here. I think all that is needed to make a complete and aesthetic make over is:

    Thourough understanding about what the content is and then designing a proper layout.

    Using subtle colors. Bright colors are seriously not an ‘in’ thing these days.

    Using lot of advanced technologies like Ajax and Javascript to make things done with minimum effort.

    Providing a layout which looks nice at any resolution on any browser.

  • User Gravatar
    JL
    September 12th, 2009 at 8:05 pm

    sourceforge (at: http://sourceforge.net/) also has been refreshed.

  • User Gravatar
    Jasmin Halkic
    September 13th, 2009 at 12:07 pm

    Very nice collection :)

  • User Gravatar
    Matt
    September 13th, 2009 at 12:09 pm

    You left ESPN off. I’d include them and drop Twitter, which was a big change in appearance but not much else.

  • User Gravatar
    Edwin
    September 13th, 2009 at 12:25 pm

    Nice collection, although most of these have been re-designed primarily because of Usability issues.
    The Whitehouse site is insane. I met the artist and creative team that created that during the last 6 weeks of obama’s campaign.

  • User Gravatar
    Miguel Tavares
    September 13th, 2009 at 12:43 pm

    Surely a very interesting list there! Thanks for sharing.

  • User Gravatar
    Cymberly
    September 13th, 2009 at 1:14 pm

    Like the article.

    What about southwest.com? They redesigned their site so that users could book a flight straight from the homepage with no additional clicks.

  • User Gravatar
    Rahul - Web Guru
    September 13th, 2009 at 1:20 pm

    For me, Facebook, wordpress and yahoo will top my list.

  • User Gravatar
    Zábavná videa
    September 13th, 2009 at 5:24 pm

    Amazing and nice. Thanks!

  • User Gravatar
    Eliza
    September 13th, 2009 at 7:09 pm

    The MySpace redesign is a prime example of over-designing imo. They never seem to hit the mark, not to mention their users pages are hideous…

    I love the new White House web site, from a purely visual standpoint it is beautiful but it is also a lot easier to navigate and is being successfully used as a powerful political device as well (whether or not that is appropriate is another debate, haha). Also agreeing with an above poster about the USPS website.

    Thanks for this interesting post!

  • User Gravatar
    Tutorial Lounge
    September 14th, 2009 at 3:23 am

    really amazing collection you sharing with us. thanks

  • User Gravatar
    Mike
    September 14th, 2009 at 3:48 am

    Lots of interesting changes and adaptations of different websites. Its amazing how much people react to change though, particularly thinking of the Facebook redesigns. But if they didn’t make those changes they would simply get left behind.

  • User Gravatar
    Terris Kremer
    September 14th, 2009 at 6:11 pm

    I especially like the whitehouse.gov redesign. In particular, the way they updated the old president with a newer, more modern one was an excellent choice – both aesthetically and from a user friendly standpoint – in my opinion.

    I suppose that’s debatable though. ;)

  • User Gravatar
    Adrian von Gegerfelt
    September 16th, 2009 at 6:30 am

    Still, MySpace’s produces the UGLIEST user profiles because it lets users change anything, but have terrible markup behind (what happened to div IDs and classes?!). Also, use still “theme” your page by injecting CSS rules in the “about me” field.

  • User Gravatar
    Vitezslav Valka
    September 16th, 2009 at 8:47 am

    Twitter needs much more than this simple visual redesign. Facebook made a great progress in what they did. I see a lot of work behind that change.

  • User Gravatar
    Hegyeli Hunor
    September 18th, 2009 at 8:21 am

    The whitehouse.gov design is the best.

  • User Gravatar
    Joe Stevens
    September 19th, 2009 at 1:08 pm

    I was worried that no one would ever visit the Twitter page until I saw their redesign. It makes Twitter’s homepage very useful now. Brilliant move on their part.

  • User Gravatar
    Paul
    September 20th, 2009 at 8:01 am

    I agree with Lád’a that Apple was worthy of note. Another very significant change came just yesterday with Ecademy. While not well known in North America, it is a very well known social media site elsewhere. They completely revitaized their look, and jumped from an exceptionally old interface to a much more friendly and modern look. Kudos to them, and to you for this post. Thanks!

  • User Gravatar
    Fast List Building Blog
    September 21st, 2009 at 4:55 am

    Amazing! Its great to know and see these websites pretty good changes. Thanks for the update.

  • User Gravatar
    Jan Middleton
    September 21st, 2009 at 9:54 pm

    It’s really good when big names show us the way to update, rethink and refresh our image. The world’s a changin’

  • User Gravatar
    JohnONolan
    September 22nd, 2009 at 4:38 am

    VERY tenuous title, but good post all the same :)

  • User Gravatar
    dizelbox
    October 2nd, 2009 at 10:46 am

    It’s real class

  • User Gravatar
    shastew
    December 21st, 2009 at 7:50 pm

    This is interesting, but some more analysis would be useful. I’m not a website or page designer, nor am I a graphic artist, and it’s not obvious to me what the intended benefit or impact is of each change made to the example websites. I’m sure someone knows…perhaps they could chime in?

  • User Gravatar
    Reduziert
    February 11th, 2010 at 7:20 pm

    I really like the Amazon redisign. It still looks a bit like 1998, but alot cooler ;)

  • User Gravatar
    Max
    March 13th, 2010 at 3:06 pm

    Twitter looked better with the old design in my opinion, same goes for Ebay…

  • User Gravatar
    Web Design Maidstone Kent
    April 21st, 2010 at 4:32 am

    I remember the eBay one. It happened during a few days when I was using it quite alot. It’s interesting to see how most of the redesigns adopted the same graphical look of rounded, 3 dimensional buttons (with the obvious adoption of the “Web 2.0″ look.
    The WordPress site I think looks fantastic these days.

  • User Gravatar
    Computer Lautsprecher
    August 3rd, 2010 at 4:22 am

    quite cool to see how every big page sticks to its old style. i think it would be interesting to know if they still use the same design company?!

  • User Gravatar
    Ioan
    November 1st, 2010 at 2:52 am

    Some great examples there!

    Moving on to this year and I think YouTube must have had one of the most drastic redesigns I’ve seen in quite a while, and then of course we have the Google alterations, especially in recent weeks.

    IDW

  • User Gravatar
    Billiger Einkaufen
    November 18th, 2010 at 10:04 am

    Hmm, I don’t see much improvement with Yahoo, it’s still the 90s style and I really hope they’ll manage to take it to the next level anytime VERY soon.

  • User Gravatar
    Eviction Forms
    March 16th, 2011 at 2:31 pm

    I am really impressed by these top 10 biggest website redesigns of all time. These are simply stunning, unbelievable, exciting and very very useful. Thanks a lot for posting such an interesting information.

  • User Gravatar
    evansville housing
    March 17th, 2011 at 3:48 pm

    It is always encouraging to find them improving their presence with these palpating changes around the web. I think the post presents this magnificent list of these biggest website redesigns. It is a great work.

  • User Gravatar
    Crisman
    April 10th, 2011 at 5:50 pm

    Add to the list the new FCC website, it is quite the overhaul. Check out the old and new side by side: http://bit.ly/frzrVE

  • User Gravatar
    business valuations
    April 18th, 2011 at 4:27 pm

    Since website redesign is nothing but updating your company vision, mission, values and the goals, it would be very exciting to learn about these top website redesigns. It is a useful and interesting post. thanks.

  • User Gravatar
    Remya
    April 28th, 2012 at 4:19 am

    Linkedin is the most user friendly redesigned website.

  • User Gravatar
    Pantho Bihosh
    June 29th, 2012 at 7:05 pm

    Really great collection I love it. Did you see- every website’s new design is more simple as before.

    Actually its proved- Simple is the best. I also love simple where simple is also gorgeous.

    Thanks for the nice collection.

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