When it comes to the frontend of your website, striving for perfection isn't always the best way forward...

Let's face it, we all love things to be perfect. Whether it's the temperature of your morning bru, a perfectly cooked steak, or the perfect weather forcast for your holiday.

The thing is, we don't get hung up on things not being perfect in day to day life, yet I see a lot of businesses wanting things to be absolutely perfect on the frontend of their site. I understand why people feel like this, and this is my opinion why...

One of the best pieces of advice I've ever had is "Don't worry about the things you can't control"

This rings true when we think about day to day life and things not being perfect. If the weather isn't perfect, we might have a little winge, but we don't waste our time striving for perfect weather; it's impossible; completely our of our hands, BUT, our website isn't!

Your own website is something you do have control over, and it is something we can make perfect. So, let's make it perfect!

Woah there tiger, lets think about this for a second...

I saw an example of this strive for perfection, and this is essentially what I'm getting at with this post. There was a feature built for a merchant which showed some different pricing on the frontend of the site. The feature was "ready" to go live, but there was one problem...

One of the fonts didn't match the other font size exactly

The feature could have gone live as it was, but because the business wasn't happy with the font sizing, it caused a delay on the feature going live before the weekend, which meant it had to wait until the next working week.

To me, this was very strange. If the feature went live on the Thursday, it would have started to gather data over the weekend so the businesses could see how effective it was. More importantly, the feature would have helped users on the frontend in that it would give them more information.

That's the killer for me. We're not giving user's this extra information that might help them, for the sake of a font not being big enough.

"What really matters" is up to you.

Is it making people inside your own business happy; is it making sure every font on the website is exactly the same size; is it making sure your own KPI's are met, or is it the frontend user? Only you can make that decision, but I'd seriously urge you to think about users, what affect things have on your users, and also cost...

Striving for perfection can be expensive!

I've seen examples of businesses spending 20+ hours on a small display issue for people using a Samsung Galaxy. Even though they were advised that Samsung Galaxy users were a tiny percentage of their users, they wanted it done anyway to appease one of the internal business managers.

This may sound daft, but it happens. 

• Don't sweat the small stuff if it doesn't have a negative effect on your users
• Take a step back and think about what really matters
• Don't waste your money!