One of my clients likes to tinker with his site. Some days he’s certain the home page needs to be reorganized because the graphics haven’t been as effective as he’d hoped. On other days, he believes it’s absolutely crucial for us to work on improving his conversion rates. Finally, there are times where he’s entirely certain we should rethink the site’s color scheme. No detail, small or large, is ever overlooked.
Above all all, I generally try not to be dogmatic about anything, least of all web design, which is an evolving discipline. So I’m absolutely certain that, in a sense, he’s right: the home page might be improved with punchier graphics, of course we should be mindful of his conversion rates and, yes, the color scheme changes he’s suggesting might be more effective.
But before I continue, I should mention that his site has only been live for a few weeks and that he gets, at most, 100-200 visitors each day. Because of that simple fact, none of the things he wants to do will be seen by many users and, consequently, any perceived changes in performance will be statistically meaningless.
There are two metaphors that come to mind when trying to describe this situation. The first is that of putting the cart before the horse. The site gets launched and almost immediately the antsy owner begins tinkering with elements of the design, incessantly checking Adsense earnings, and so forth. But none of these things have anything to do with building traffic to the point where those changes actually become effective.
The second metaphor is that of a dog chasing it’s tail, though it would be more accurate to call it a feedback loop. In a feedback loop you’re doing things of little consequence, monitoring them and discovering they had little to no effect and then going back and making more changes, also of no consequence, which causes unsatisfactory results that necessitate yet another round of tinkering. It’s lather, rinse, repeat, ad infinitum – you’re in an unproductive loop, wasting time when you should be doing other, more important things.
Perhaps you know someone like this. Maybe that someone happens to be yourself. This behavior is not uncommon and I confess to also having been guilty of it on occasion. But by recognizing its causes and why it’s bad you can take the precautions that will help you to avoid it.
The urge to continually refine and monitor a site’s performance stems from a natural desire to to know if what you’ve produced has been effective; you put a lot of effort into that site, and it would be nice to know that people are using it. But it’s also ultimately counterproductive. The truth is that it’s easy to tinker, but dangerous to do so early in the life cycle of a web site because it has so little value; it is only after traffic has been built and the user base is larger that these changes begin to make sense.
Part of what makes tinkering so alluring is that it’s always easier to critique your own work than it is to do more of it. Perhaps you don’t even realize that what you’re doing is a form of procrastination. We often think of procrastination as simply putting things off entirely when, more often than not, we are doing something – just not what it is that we should be doing.
For the the site manager, getting on the path towards meaningful productivity requires the recognition that tinkering is a symptom that there are more important things to be done – and the discipline to see that they are. So, begin by getting your priorities straight. Remember that everything you do has to be in the service of the bigger picture. Whether you’re trying to increase your e-commerce site’s sales or your blog’s page views it all begins with visitors: without them, you’re just tinkering your way to nowhere.
