Is it hard to update a website?
Short answer: no
You know what’s hard? Changing something that’s already been printed.
When I was a wee lass fresh out of design school I got a job at a small book design agency. I cut my teeth doing something called book compositing.
This largely involved typesetting, making sure all the spacing between the words looked good, that there were no orphans or widows. It was detail oriented and painstaking.
When a book was finished and went through it’s last round of proofs, it would be sent off to China to be printed. Now, this was the nineties. So what you had to do was put all of your QuarkXPress and font files on something called a Jaz Drive .
Jaz drives were a BFD back then, they held up to 1 whole Gigabyte of data!
Once you got everything on your Jaz, you’d trot over to FedEx on your horse and buggy so everything could be shipped to the printer.
For me, this is when the stress really started.
I’d lay in bed at night wondering: Did I include all the fonts? Did I forget to set the spacing correctly in the index pages? Did I transfer the right version of the file onto the disk?
If I made a mistake, the book would come back with my big fat fuck up immortalised forever in print. There for god and everyone to see and laugh at for all eternity.
Luckily for me, my coming of age as a designer coincided with the birth of the information highway, the great world wide web! I loved it the minute I looked onto it’s little www baby face. So instant! So immediate! So forgiving of errors!
Overnight, start-ups were everywhere (I was in San Francisco, ground zero of the first dot com boom). I got a job at one. I remember talking to one of the developers. We made some changes on an image on one of the webpages. It was already launched, what to do?!?!
‘No problem’ he told me, just put another jpeg on the server and I’ll upload the new one. Just like that. Changes, mistakes all just refresh-able. I was never going back to print.
Why do I tell you this little story? I want you to understand how insanely easy it is to make changes on your website. How easy life is in our digital world.
This is why you don’t need to obsess about every little detail before getting your website launched. You can change it, easily! I’ve written that your website launch is not your wedding day.
The website we launch is not created in stone or ink. It’s created in light and pixels.
What you need is a ‘good enough’ website. A website that looks professional, that makes you feel proud for sure. But the details? You’ll probably be tweaking those forever. I make changes to my website at least once a week.
Launch and tweak, launch and tweak. This is how progress is made, not by making sure everything is absolutely perfect and then hitting the ‘launch’ button.
Here’s a secret: It will never be perfect.
If this makes sense to you, then you’ll probably like the Launch In A Day process. Take a look and if you like what you see, let’s talk: