Competing on the web is like trying to paddle your boat against the current. If your efforts are weak or inconsistent-- you're sure to be swept away. You can only get ahead when you accept the fact that, no matter how much effort you have already put into it, you can't afford to quit for even a moment.

Perpetual success is all about anticipating every challenge and taking advantage of every opportunity. You can't anticipate or take advantage of your situation unless you have a realistic idea of where you are and clear expectations for where you want to go.

Whenever a web project is started, there is an intense drive to get to the point of completion: launching the new site. Everything revolves around it. Planning, budgeting, designing, programming, writing, tweaking, polishing, and testing. Then the moment of satisfaction finally comes: the website is live.

Then the inevitable happens. It might take a month or two. In some cases it only takes a week. Or even within a day or two it can happen. Sooner or later, you will find out that your website is lacking in some way.

You might find out that your website is not compatible with a certain device. Perhaps it's not as well optimized for search engines as it could be. Maybe it loads slower than it should for some users. It could be a trivial oversight or a monumental blunder. No matter what the case is, it's usually very discouraging and it almost always leads to some resentment for the so-called experts who were hired to put the site together.

All these negative feelings are just a waste of energy. If you're wallowing in discouragement about what your website should have been then you're focusing your energy in the wrong place. Your website is what it is. Get a grip on whatever that means and then turn your attention and resources towards bridging the gap between where you are and where you want to go...

Trusting in Imperfect Experts

Before you can get serious about your website you need to find a good team of experts you can trust. You'll need people who know about things like graphic design, information architecture, application development, and internet marketing. One way or the other you need to ensure that you can trust that they:

• Have real experience helping others succeed online.
• Have proven expertise in their field of work.
• Have the best interests of their clients at the heart of their work.

How can you verify these things? That's a difficult question to answer. Everywhere you go you'll find people who talk the talk and they sound very slick. Finding people who can actually perform will require you to get your feet wet. You need to try some things out and find out through experience if someone can deliver. This involves some risk taking and knowing when to cut your loses.

More important than knowing when to cut your losses is knowing when to hold a good position. If you have a team of professionals you know you can trust, you'll be able to push forward no matter what challenges arise.

The Grass Really Is Always Greener

No matter how much you put into your website-- there is always more you can do. It's not just about constant enhancement and embellishment. It's about executing a consistent strategy that gets results. Your strategy should account for a variety of ever-changing factors:

• Your Competition is Always Moving Forward
  In most markets and industries, large and small businesses are aggressively competing for every customer and every dollar.
• Development and Design Techniques are Always Evolving
  In general, the underlying technologies uses to create and publish websites and web applications don't change very quickly. But the techniques and methods used to leverage these technologies are rapidly improving.
• Skills are Always Improving
  In addition to embracing new advancements in techniques, the best professionals will always be improving their own skills. Your trusted professionals will be better at what they do this year than they were last year.

Pausing your efforts for even a short time will result in quickly falling farther and farther behind.

Challenges & Opportunities

It's always cheaper to hire people with less experience. But the question you have to ask yourself is: Do you want to pay for someone's experience, or for their education? More experience usually translates into fewer and fewer mistakes.

Everything is always changing on the web and some changes will still catch even the most experienced professionals off guard. In the role of decision-maker for your website strategy, you'll learn over time to anticipate and prepare for challenges before they become big problems. At the beginning, anticipating challenges is all about preparing yourself to handle unexpected problems. But soon you'll be in a better position-- a position where you can actually leverage unexpected changes for your advantage.

Executing Priorities

Once you realize that there is no limit to what can be done to improve your website, your goal should be to create and maintain a specific strategy that outlines and prioritizes immediate action plans as well as longer-term objectives.

Your plan should not focus on finding an end-point to your work on your website. Instead, your strategy should be centered around constantly evaluating all of the possibilities and executing work that will achieve the most benefit with smallest investments of time and money.

Tracking Progress

One of the most beautiful aspects of web strategy is the fact that everything you do can be tracked. The impact (good or bad) of any change you make or feature you add can be monitored. This makes it easy to have an objective-based strategy for your website.

Instead of starting with the question "What does our website need?", you should start with: "What does our business need?". The answer may be more customers, fewer customer service calls, faster deliveries, or anything else. Whatever your objectives are-- they should be specifically tied to the changes you make to your site.

If you're adding new content to the site, it should be for a reason. That reason should be tracked. If you get the results you wanted then you're happy. If not, you know you failed. Either way, you don't have to guess. Over time you'll get better and better at making smart decisions upfront, and you'll love the fact that you can see progress related to real business objectives.

Enjoying the Ride

Learning that your website is not the pinnacle example of perfection on the web wouldn't be so bad if not being perfect was actually part of your strategy. When you have the right mindset, you'll actually be encouraged when you find out how your website is lacking. It's like finding another piece to a bridge that will lead you from where you are to where you want to be.

If you only dedicate resources to your website at times when you're behind or when you find out something is majorly wrong-- you're going to hate everything to do with your website. But if you develop and execute a consistent strategy, embracing the realistic challenges and the opportunities that come your way, you will find yourself competing at the top of your field and reaping the rewards of success online.