I read a fascinating article in NY Times on how people perceive the world based on their language: Does Your Language Shape How You Think? The author makes a very convincing argument that language reflects what the people deem important in the world. For example, in English language gender is often not important. When hearing "I met with my neighbor" , you cannot conclude if the neighbor is a male or a female. In French or German, the gender of your neighbor is immediately known.

Gender-conscious cultures assign gender to inanimate objects. For example, for a German, a bridge is a "she", but for a Spanish speaking person, it is a "he". The author argues that grammatical genders shape the feelings that native speakers have about the objects. In practice, bridge architecture inherits those feelings. Consequently, we can observe feminine or masculine features in bridge architecture.

And in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways. - source

You are asking yourself now, how it all relates to web design? In my opinion, understanding the difference in perception of your website will save you money and headaches. Let me explain.

Focus On Your User And Take Over The World

In The Power of Good Enough - Part 1 I illustrated that if you have a product that people want or don't yet know they want, your product does not to be perfect to take over the market. It has to be good enough for people to try it, to discover how much they like it and tell you what it will take for the users to get addicted to your product.

In The Power of Good Enough - Part 2 I will tell you how small changes lead to big results, how simple questions produce incredible insights, and how you too can increase revenue from your website.

If your goal is world domination, let's get you there.

I have worked with web developers, I have managed web developers, and I understand web developers. One thing all web developers have in common - they are all perfectionists. They want to develop a perfect web site, with plenty of great features that are cool, useful and complex. And before the masterpiece is complete, they are not ready to release it into the real world. It has to be perfect.

These "Version 1.0" guys want to deliver a dream. Not surprisingly, nothing will be delivered without sales, marketing, product and project management if you leave it to web developers. Early on, these guys learn the lesson of "good enough".

Very often companies are not focused, trying to perfect everything, to fix all the bugs and unveil exactly what they promised and more. Unfortunately, these companies are as often late to market and off the mark. Theory is great, but practice still makes perfect. So today I am going to talk about the power of "good enough".

Tackling your web site design project

You have been saying for a while that you need to do something about your website. Finally, you are ready to get the project started, to hire someone to design your website. Great!

But why are you not feeling that great? And what does it really mean - "website design"? What is it that you want, specifically?

If you are like most people, what you want is to have a great website that does not take up a lot of your time and dominate the online market share in your field. That sounds reasonable. Is it any clearer to you what to do? Probably not.

If you still not sure where to start, let's start at the beginning - let's start with your goals. Do you know what your website goals are? Do you have your targets defined? How will you measure your website success?

Let's dissect the website design to understand it better.

Your website is up and running, search engines found you and indexed your pages, and you got your fist visitor. The question is, how many visitors you need to make money? In this video I explain, how to calculate your estimated monthly traffic to achieve your goal. I used an example of a search engine traffic (and only a search engine traffic). In real life, you will have many sources of traffic - hopefully. My intention is to illustrate how to make projections for your website success.