Think Your Web Site's Perfect? Think Again.
Four reasons to change a "perfect" Web site.
Four reasons to change a "perfect" Web site.
You may recall that phrase, “practically perfect in every way” from the film “Mary Poppins.” Although it was used to describe Mary, who was indeed quite perfect, it’s a phrase I sometimes hear from Web site owners. Unfortunately, when they describe their sites this way, they may be swallowing a few too many spoonfuls of sugar to make the medicine go down.
Web design and analytics tends to focus a lot on making things better. There’s always room for improvement. The Web is such a dynamic environment that between the design of a site and its launch, the variety of available technologies could have completely changed. As marketers and business owners, we’re trained to seek out and fix imperfections in our sites. We scrutinize our scorecards as if they’re the stats for a fantasy baseball team, knowing with just the right trade, we’ll make it to this year’s World Series.
It’s easy to become complacent and begin to believe your site has reached a state of near-perfection at which no further improvement is required. This can happen when scorecards are on a continuous upward slope and business is doing well. Perhaps orders are up month over month for the past year and customer satisfaction is at an all-time high. The prospect of investing six figures in a site update just doesn’t make sense, particularly when other marketing programs may be drastically under-funded.
So, if it’s practically perfect, why make changes?
Here are four reasons:
Keeping your site’s success in perspective is a key lesson for every marketer and business owner. In a culture of analysis, the numbers can sometimes look so good that our attention wanders elsewhere. Things may appear practically perfect, but appearances can be deceiving.