One of my clients e-mailed me this quote the other day.  He found it on Adam Kmiec’s blog and thought of me because he knows how much I LOVE RAIN (especially HUGE thunderstorms and puddlejumping with the terrorists) and he felt it summed up a visit I’d had with his team the previous week.

The nanosecond our meeting started, his folks started passing me their individual Wish Lists.  Pages and pages of paper with things that they wanted to do on their next resdesign.

Over eighteen hundred items (and at least one dead tree) full of things they’ve been wanting to but haven’t done yet.

Shockingly, some of the items had been on the list for over two years.

Two years?

In internet years, that’s at least three lifetimes!

Here’s the thing…. 

The internet is not paper.  (Thankfully.)  What you put on your website today is not permanent.  You can change it any time you like.  Right this very minute in fact.

Yes, I realize that everyone and their brother already knows that but do companies act like it?  Not.  So.  Much.

The majority of folks are still treating the online world like the offline world – they put together a big list of stuff for the next major website revision and then they work to that specific date six months out.  Just like they would a catalog or a television commercial.

Or, in other cases, a couple changes snowballs to become a website overhaul, not a website refresh.   The screaming girls get ignored in favor of typo changes on pages that are never viewed.  People move at the speed of a bicycle, not at the speed of light.  It’s a problem and it impacts your bottom line.

You need to learn to dance in the rain.

The company I was visiting had almost 2,000 items for their next relaunch?  Nobody, and I do mean nobody, is ever going to get 2,000 items done and done correctly in a website relaunch.  It doesn’t happen and frankly, it shouldn’t.  If you have 2,000 items to do, it means you don’t know how to prioritize and prioritization is THE key to your web success.   (It’s sort of like dressing for the weather. You don’t want to wear a bikini in a blizzard, right?)

The storm never really passes on the internet because the internet is THE storm.  It’s never going to be over.  (And if you’re clueless enough to think it is, tell me what you’re doing with mobile, ok?)

My suggestion to you….

Throw away this whole “complete redesign” process.  Start looking at daily and weekly changes, not changes six months out.  

Focus on what’s important.  Not to you but to your users.  Figure out what they want, what they need and how you can better give it to them.  All too often these things on your wish list are just that, YOUR wishes, not your users’ wants and needs. 

And above all, measure what matters.