It’s a big temptation for people to want everything to be perfect on their website before they launch it. But that’s a huge mistake.
I’ve seen it time and time again. Clients often will drag out launching their website because they have this mindset that it needs to be perfect before they’ll pull the trigger or let anyone outside their organization see their website.
The Perfection Fallacy
That perception expectation is wrong on a couple levels.
For starters, there is no perfect website. No matter how good your website is, there is always room to make it better. When you delay things because you want it to be “pixel perfect” you might as well be holding it up on until you have a unicorn sighting.
Those two things will happen at about the same time.
Not to mention the internet is evolving at an incredibly rapid place. No matter how perfect your website is today it will quickly be eclipsed by something new that’s impossible to predict.
But there’s an even bigger problem.
Delaying Your Greater Goals
Your focus on perfection is delaying your greater goals of reaching more people.
While you are laboring over every pixel on your website your competition is already reaching more people with their websites. Your delay is wasting time and distracting you from what you should be doing to grow your organization.
The perfect is the enemy of the good.— Voltaire
Strive for Excellence not Perfection
I’m not saying that you have to settle for junk. It’s just that you need to shift your focus slightly. Instead of trying to be perfect the goal should be excellence.
Your website is something that is constantly growing and improving. Get it to a good place then launch that sucker! Start publishing your great content. Keep adding to it.
Your website should be getting better and better every day because you keep adding to and improving your content. It comes back to something I posted on Facebook the other day:
It’s the small things which compound over time that make the biggest difference. Want to achieve excellence? Make today a little more excellent than yesterday. Build that into a daily habit and achieving excellence is assured.— Chris Cree
Put together a good plan. Then get it in action.
Practice What I Preach
That’s my own approach. And SuccessCREEations here is a good example of that.
Believe it or not, even though websites are my business, just like most folks I have trouble making time to work on my own website(s). We have so much client business that we need to focus on that it can take a while to get to our own sites.
It’s a classic case of “the cobbler’s kids have no shoes.”
Even so I do the work anyway, when I can. In the little spare time I’ve had this summer I’ve been working on a reboot of the website here. I wanted to incorporate some improvements like responsive design. Plus our business has changed significantly in the last year and our website needed to be changed to reflect our business better.
But between the wildfires and everything this summer has not gone according to my plans – at all! I wasn’t really ready to launch the new site yet.
However when It comes to websites I’m a chronic tinkerer. Historically this site is where I do my tinkering. And this weekend I broke something on the old site.
When I did that I had a choice.
I could spend time fixing what I broke. Or I could go ahead and launch the new site even though it’s not where I want it to be yet.
I chose to go ahead with the new site rather than spending time backtracking on the old one. That means there is still at ton of stuff left to do here.
I’ll get it done because I’m building a habit of making it a little more excellent today than it was yesterday.
And in the process I’ll practice what I preach.
