For most business owners, designing a website can be a very daunting task because your website is a representation of your business in the global marketplace. In the beginning, everything from the initial concept outline to the completed design is considered very carefully, but many times during the process of building and finalizing the site, the scope of the site changes. These changes can occur for a variety of different reasons: a new product has been added, something has changed in the marketplace, new players are added to the game and the list goes on and on.

So how do you know when it is ready?

The simple answer is that it will never be 100% ready. A website is an interactive medium meant to inform and engage your audience. The site content (text, graphics, animations, downloads, all of it) should be changing regularly to keep it fresh and evolving as your business and/or the medium (the internet) changes.

Don’t be a creep (or a victim of one)!

The idea of declaring a site as perfect then putting it up and walking away is just silly. Don’t allow your web project to get stymied in the mire of scope creep. Stick to your original concept and see it through to the end all the while taking notes on all of the great new ways you can enhance your customer experience going forward. Just don’t let those new ideas distract you from your goal (and this goes for site redesigns as well). Once the original vision of your site is complete, reviewed, tested, etc, step up and join the ranks of the the millions of other sites that make up the world wide web and begin the task of differentiating yourself from the pack.

Only after you have established your online presence should you go back to your list of brilliant ideas that came up during the building process and begin to integrate them into your ongoing website plans. Pick out the jewels and make sure they are polished before they are set. Doing things this way will not only allow you establish yourself online faster, it will help you keep your site fresh so customers will return over and over again.

Remember, if you keep waiting for your site to be absolutely perfect before launching it to the masses, it will NEVER never find its way to your waiting global audience.