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The Perfect Website Doesn’t Exist, And That’s Okay

Written by Shaun Bernstein on .

Four score and seven careers ago, I worked with a man who we’ll call Dave.

In the halcyon days of the ecommerce, Dave was readying himself for entrepreneurship with his new home based business.

Dave had all of the knowledge and training he needed, and an amazing product on his hands, but he refused to launch his business until he had built the perfect website.

After two years of struggle, Dave walked away from it all. Neither the website, or his business, ever launched.

I’ve never forgotten Dave’s story, and still see examples of this same pattern with countless businesses today.

Sometimes it’s the blog that you’ve been meaning to start writing, but never really got off the ground.

Sometimes it’s the website itself – whether it’s simply a sketched outline on a piece of scrap paper or a fully-fledged template that never goes online.

If you wait until perfection to get started, you’re going to be waiting for an awfully long time.

A tweet on a billboard wall explaining how your first attempt at anything is bad but you cannot make it to your 100th without making your first attempt.

Here’s the thing though…

As the Tweet says, you can’t make your 100th without making your first.

Your first workout may be bad, but your second workout will be a little bit better, and your third will be even better than that.

Your first podcast may be an exercise in poor sound and technical difficulties, but after a few episodes you start to get the hang of it.

Your first time public speaking may be a jumble of nerves, but after you survive it you realize that you have what it takes to do it again, and that you can get through it the second time with fewer stumbles.

THE SAME THING IS TRUE OF YOUR WEBSITE

There are countless mistakes that you can make with your first website, but one of the worst ones is if that is also your last website, and worse still is if you never take it live at all.

Any brand that you see today with an impressive web presence – you’re probably looking at the 10th, 20th, or even 50th incarnation of their website.

If you look at what Google, Amazon, or even Apple’s websites when they started, they’re embarrassingly rudimentary by today’s standards. If those websites had remained unchanged over the past 3 decades, those companies would never be what they are today.

But they went online and they forged ahead. They launched, and then adapted, and grew and refined themselves into the sleek tech engines that we rely on today. And, if we’re being honest, even their websites aren’t perfect!

There is no such thing as a perfect website. The site that you launch on day one should not be identical to the site that you have on day 500 – in between then you can add content, write new blogs, change photography, update information, explore new add-ons and automations, etc.

But if you never launch that website at all, the same people that aren’t finding your business on day one are going to be struggling just as much 499 days later.