Posts Tagged ‘refactor’

How I refactored CSS when redesigning a website iteratively

28th April 2019

Nowadays it’s thankfully common that any backend redesign of a system, website or service is done iteratively, bit by bit. I often hear that that cannot be done with the frontend, that redesigning the look of a website always means you have to do a so-called “Big Bang release“, the very risky practice of releasing all relevant changes in one go after months of working on it.
I can prove that this is not true, because I’ve done two iterative redesigns of a website twice in my last job.

When I was rewriting and redesigning most of Zopa’s website iteratively in 2013, I used a specific method to refactor the CSS. When trying to explain how I did that, I found it’s easiest to explain its principles by showing what I did in a simplified version.
Here is that simplified version.

(Note: This blog post was hiding in my drafts folder for a couple of years. Nowadays it is best practice to use encapsulated components to achieve something similar.)

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