Progress Over Perfection

I’ve always liked things to be done right.

That sounds like a good thing.

And most of the time, it is.

But there is a difference between caring about the quality of your work and waiting until everything is perfect before you allow yourself to move forward.

I’ve had to learn that difference.

Especially with websites.

A website can always be changed.

There is always something you could adjust. A heading could be worded differently. A section could be moved. The spacing could be tweaked. A photo could be replaced. A color could be changed. You could spend another hour trying to make one little detail look exactly the way you imagined it in your head.

And sometimes that hour is worth it.

Sometimes it isn’t.

A website is never really finished

One of the things I have come to appreciate about web design is that a website doesn’t have to be perfect on day one.

It has to work.

It has to communicate.

It has to give people what they need.

And then it can grow.

That has changed the way I look at projects.

When you’re working on something creative, it’s easy to get stuck trying to make the finished version exist before you’ve even allowed the first version to exist.

You want to know exactly what every page will look like.

You want every piece of content to be perfect.

You want the layout to be right.

You want the colors to be right.

You want everything to work exactly the way you imagined it.

But sometimes you don’t know what the right answer is until you actually build something.

You have to see it.

Use it.

Change it.

Try something else.

That’s where progress happens.

I’ve learned this by doing

Building websites has taught me that sometimes the best way to figure something out is simply to start.

I’ve spent plenty of time learning new tools and working through things I didn’t completely understand yet.

I’ve rebuilt things.

I’ve changed direction.

I’ve gone back and fixed something I thought was finished.

I’ve looked at something I created and realized, Nope. That’s not working.

And then I’ve changed it.

That’s not failure.

That’s the process.

I think we sometimes put too much pressure on ourselves to get something right the first time.

Especially when we’re learning.

But learning doesn’t really work that way.

You try something.

You learn from it.

You make a better decision the next time.

Then you look back six months later and realize you would build it differently again.

That’s progress.

The first version doesn’t have to be the final version

This is something I remind myself of more and more.

The first version of something doesn’t have to be the version you keep forever.

A website can evolve.

A brand can evolve.

A portfolio can evolve.

Even the way you approach your work can evolve.

As you learn more, your decisions change.

Your eye gets better.

You notice things you didn’t notice before.

You understand your audience better.

You understand the technology better.

You understand yourself better.

So why would the work stay exactly the same?

It shouldn’t.

I’ve actually started to see that as one of the best parts of working on the web.

You aren’t carving something into stone.

You’re building something that can continue to change.

Sometimes you just have to hit publish

There is a point in every project where you have to stop tweaking and actually let people see it.

That can be uncomfortable.

Especially when you know every little thing you would still like to change.

But at some point, progress requires action.

You can research forever.

You can plan forever.

You can redesign the same section ten different ways.

You can keep telling yourself you’ll launch when it’s ready.

But sometimes “ready” becomes an excuse to keep working instead of moving forward.

I’ve learned that there is a lot of value in getting something to a good place, putting it out there, and then continuing to improve it.

That doesn’t mean lowering your standards.

It means understanding that improvement is part of the process.

There is a difference between unfinished and evolving

I think that’s an important distinction.

Something unfinished means you aren’t done with the work it needs.

Something evolving means you understand that the work can become better with time.

Those aren’t the same thing.

I don’t want to rush through a project just to say it’s finished.

I care about the details.

I care about whether something makes sense.

I care about how someone actually experiences a website, not just how it looks on my screen.

But I also don’t want perfection to keep a good project from becoming a real project.

Sometimes you have to let it exist before you can improve it.

I’m still learning this too

The funny thing about writing about progress is that I’m still figuring it out myself.

I’m still learning new things.

I’m still changing how I approach projects.

I’m still finding better ways to build.

And I’m still occasionally spending way too much time trying to fix something that probably didn’t need fixing in the first place.

But that’s okay.

Because the goal isn’t to reach some imaginary point where everything is perfect and there is nothing left to learn.

The goal is to keep moving.

Keep learning.

Keep improving.

Keep paying attention.

And keep building.

Progress is the point

I think I’ve started to appreciate progress differently.

It doesn’t always look like a finished website.

Sometimes progress is finally figuring out why something wasn’t working.

Sometimes it’s learning a new skill.

Sometimes it’s realizing that the design you started with isn’t the right design anymore.

Sometimes it’s scrapping something and starting over.

Sometimes it’s simply deciding that what you have is good enough to move to the next step.

And sometimes progress is letting yourself be proud of how far you’ve come without immediately focusing on what still needs to be fixed.

A website doesn’t have to be perfect to be valuable.

A project doesn’t have to be perfect to teach you something.

And you don’t have to have everything figured out before you take the next step.

I’ve learned that the more I work, the more I understand that good work isn’t about getting everything right the first time.

It’s about being willing to keep making it better.

Because the goal isn’t perfection.

The goal is progress.