Moses was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights without eating bread or drinking water. And he wrote on the [stone] tablets the words of the covenant—the Ten Commandments.

– Exodus 34:28

No wonder it took 40 days and 40 nights. God and Moses wrote the Commandments onto stone tablets that had to instruct Jews and Christians for thousands of years afterward. They had to get it right the first time, so they put a lot of time into it.

Your website, however, is not that important, nor that permanent.

We started with stone tablets, then hand-written script on parchment, then the printing press, now the Internet. An abbreviated history of the printing industry to be sure, but an important timeline nonetheless.

That history has conditioned us to think that publishing has to be perfect. It’s going to be permanent, our subconscious silently screams at us, drowning out our better judgment. So we better make sure that a lot more than just the t’s and i’s are crossed and dotted, right?

Wrong. Your website has more in common with a smoke signal than it does with the permanent printing technology of ages long gone. You’ll learn to send better signals the more you practice, and your message will get clearer and clearer as time goes on. Each signal you send will quickly be forgotten and eclipsed by the next one.

Think of it as an innocent playground mistake. With infinite do-overs.

So think about your site — from your customer’s perspective, not yours — very carefully and very quickly. And then launch it. Don’t waste 40 days and 40 nights on it.

Forty minutes a month is plenty.

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