Perfection Isn’t Necessary

Perfection can be a barrier to progress when launching or redesigning a website. Instead of letting delays and endless revisions stall momentum, just start, refine as you go, and let your story evolve over time.

If you haven’t read Feck Perfuction, I highly recommend picking up a copy. A friend of mine recommended it a few months ago and I just finished reading it. You can draw some very simple conclusions about the through line of the book by its title — and those conclusions would assuredly be accurate.

Perfectionism is a trait I see a lot in the web world. A new website is a company’s “calling card” and their first impression to the world. It has to be perfect, right? Heck, for a long time, a common feature on web developers’ websites was the fact that they could code a website’s design “pixel perfectly” (oh, how responsive design crushed the need for that thankfully).

Does it have to be perfect?

You’ve probably heard something along the lines of: “Your website should be a living part of your marketing team.” If that’s true, why does getting the website launched end up stalling in the final few weeks of prep?

Too many stakeholders get involved in the final stretch. I realize there is a reason for this in larger organizations (checks and balances are important). We try to get those individuals involved at the beginning of the work so their ideas can be heard so there is less back-n-forth at the end.

Technical checks require more people. This one of the few reasons for stalls that I fully endorse. When it comes to validating foundational technical requirements have been met (ie. ensuring SEO migration has double checked), having separate eyes on this outside the individuals that did the technical work is key.

Just start

Let’s look at this from two different angles: (1) launching a redesigned site and (2) pushing “go” on the redesign process.

Just Launch

Outside of enterprise-level edge cases, most redesigned sites do a better job at telling your story than you current have. You’ve just spent months with an outside agency (or your internal team) to build this new site to showcase your brand’s personality — just launch it.

Just Go

This is where an external team helps. If working on a project this size with only your internal team members, it is easy to get into a “chasing your tail” mindset:

  1. I want to start, but first we need to better understand what pages we want to keep and delete
  2. But before that, we need to decide if our core message is going to change
  3. But before that, it would be really helpful if we had a photo shoot done so we have better pictures of our team to use
  4. But before that ….. It starts an endless loop of all the things you should do before getting started.

Partnering with someone who has the gameplan that you can simply plug in your information into will stop the tail-chasing and actually create some momentum.

“But” what?

Everyone has buts:

  • These new pages are solid, but I have run them up the flagpole
  • These new designs will connect with our target audience better, but I don’t know if they will be approved
  • I like this new structure for email campaigns, but I don’t know if I can even get approved to send to a subset of our audience.

Working inside of an organization, you naturally will have navigate through a lot of buts. That is a part of life.

However, which of those buts are worth pushing against in order to create some momentum?

Keep momentum

If you simply get started and navigate through one or two of the buts, something new and improved will launch. Your story will be told better. The ability to interact with your audience will improve.

When this website launched, it wasn’t perfect. While building it, we simplified our entire story down to one page. Sure, we will need more. But we knew if we tried to be perfect and have everything buttoned up, it would take forever to get our internal team moving.

So, we just started.

And now we have momentum. You can, too.

It’s easier to continue moving than to start from zero.

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