I think this [edited to add: meaning Air New Zealand's marketing team thinking that previous customers would care to receive a mail saying they updated their website] is a consequence of certain people involved in the creative process wanting to know that what they do matters. However, since many of them are fundamentally old-school marketers, their metric for matters is Successful Product Launch and to do a Successful Product Launch you have to make a lot of noise. Indeed, absence of noise means a failure.<p>Six weeks later it isn't their problem anymore.<p>This is not how I would suggest thinking about web design for most people here. Web design supports business goals. Redesigns support business goals. You measure business goals, when they go up as a result of a redesign, you bust out the freaking party hats. When your talented design firm goes off and produces a heartbreaking work of staggering genius that succeeds in reducing conversion by 23%, you thank them for their time, exchange a firm handshake, and do the next project better.<p>Now, as a fact of life, you are probably going to learn that "pretty" and "converts well" have very little to do with each other, and that a lot of iterative improvement beats the everloving stuffing out of big-bang redesigns. (Don't take my word for it. Collect data and run the numbers. I'm right, but your designers won't believe me until they see the numbers. They probably won't believe me after they see the numbers, either. That is when you fire them.)<p>I know a lot of designers chafe under the notion that the best possible use of their time is probably creating 96 different versions of the signup button in slightly different shades of red to test against each other. Yeah, life sucks that way -- I didn't get into CS to do SQL optimization for CRUD reports, either. I suggest taking up a hobby. When you're on the clock, do productive work.