Stepping Back From Your Web Design – The Power of Letting Go

I have a website that I consider to be my ‘baby’. This is my pet project and I’m immensely proud of it, and making sure that it’s a success is one of my biggest ambitions in life; so I do everything in my power to ensure that it’s the best website I can create and that I’ve put every last drop of effort into it.

Unfortunately though the site is also my least successful business endeavour, and is regularly rated by my friends and colleagues alike as the worst of my websites. So what’s going wrong?

I Just Care… Too Much

It might seem odd to think that of all my sites it’s the one I put so much stock into that should struggle, but in fact it’s precisely that care that creates the problem. And this happens in a number of ways…

The first way that being too close to the project creates a problem is in the way that it stops me seeing the site for what it is. I know what I want people to think of the site as – but that’s not really what it is. Most people I know just think of it as a bodybuilding site, and as a small one at that. I’m so keen for it to be an all encompassing self-development site though that I present it in a way that’s not congruent with people’s expectations and of course this prevents it from doing as well as it could.

The problem is that I’m really designing the site based on what I want rather than on what I know other people like. The way any business should work is that of course you should design for your customers and you should iterate the site based on feedback and on market research. This is one reason that it’s advisable to use web designers rather than to create your site yourself – even if you have the skills – because that way you get an objective view from someone who has a lot of experience in the industry rather than just making a site you want to see.

Perfectionism Isn’t Always a Good Thing

Meanwhile the site also suffers from the fact that I’m never satisfied with it. Because I always want it to be the best and shiniest example of a website out there, I’m constantly tweaking it and making changes and this makes it somewhat inconsistent. It also means that I put a lot more content on the other sites because nothing meets the high expectations for my golden child. The way this is supposed to work though is that you update your site often and make the changes you think are a good idea, and then you iterate them over time to improve them.

While it’s good to have high standards you do need to draw the line somewhere and you need to understand that the rules of business must apply even when you want to go in another direction with your site. Sometimes taking a step back and listening to others is the best thing you can do for your site. And the other moral of this story? Don’t try and ‘force’ your business onto the market, let them tell you what they want and don’t put too much stock in any one venture. If you love your site, you need to let it go…