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The Wheat & the Chaff
by Aimee Romero in General on Apr 07, 2009
When you find yourself in the frenzied flurry of ferocious agitation that is the weeks surrounding the launch of your first-born website, envision the picture painted by the words of John the Baptist.
“He is ready to separate the chaff from the wheat with his winnowing fork. Then he will clean up the threshing area, gathering the wheat into his barn but burning the chaff with never-ending fire.”
The days (sometimes weeks) before your website goes live are spent on the proverbial threshing floor. Suddenly that copy you worked so hard to gather looks sloppy and excessive, you’re second-guessing the content on the homepage and you’re wondering how in the world you forgot about an entire department within your company.
This is the part where we tell you that your website will never truly be complete. You’re going to need to continue growing it, grooming it and burning off the chaff…forever. You’ve got to keep that site living and breathing and relevant, or all this hard work is going to wear off in no time. The sooner you come to grips with the fact that there is no perfectly complete website, the better.
So grab your winnowing fork and let’s get busy refining.
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Very true. This is actually part of why I enjoy working with the web so much. It’s not a brochure that gets printed a thousand times and that’s it. It’s a living breathing thing that you can continue to perfect and refine and make into a better and better experience for your users.
Oh, and nice on connecting John the Baptist to web sites.
I really like the idea of viewing one’s website in a more organic way. Clients are often pre-occupied ‘final products’ so the thought of a growing organism can challenge the traditional means of evaluating cut-through and how the site expresses an entire company ethos.
Good thinking Aimee. Loving your fresh spin on this issue. Copenhagen could use more thinkers like yourself :-)
Love that visual analogy from John the Baptist! It’s when you really care a lot about the results that the second guessing and tweaking can become a problem. Its good to see that your company puts that kind of extra effort into your projects. Kudos.
I also like your analogy with John the Baptist and like John I always find self-flagellation helps ease the guilt of an incomplete website.
I also agree totally that a website should be kept living and breathing. Very much like a tamagotchi you have to keep feeding it or it will die. I mourned many a dead website and like John again I pray they have found salvation and rest peacefully at http://www.archive.org.
It was easy to relate John the Baptist. He said exactly what makes sense for all of life… and YES your website ought to live, breathe and increase!