Here’s how web development usually happens: Go into a dark closest and don’t come out until the entire project is flat-out done.

The problem? Web projects are a daunting, time-consuming task. 60% of projects that should be done never get started. 30% of projects that do get started never finish. And over 50% of all web projects fall way short of expectations, because they took much more resources (time and money) than originally allocated or estimated.

[By the way, I made those numbers up, but they are educated guesses.]

Web development firms are the worse offender of stat #1 (they never start). Firms usually have really bad web sites while their clients’ web sites shine. We just don’t have enough time to do our own.

But I think there’s a solution: Incremental Improvement. Don’t go into the dark closet and make sure everything is perfect before you come out. Take a section of your web site and improve that section. Make a tweak to your home page. Add some functionality to your services page. Liven up your bio pages for goodness sake. Make an improvement to your web site every month, and before you know it, you’ll have a new web site by the end of the year.

Merge will do an overhaul one of these days. But in the meantime, we’re going to do Incremental Improvements on our own web site. You’ll see the home page change, the portfolio section get updated and our bios get a little more zip. An hour here, an hour there. It’s not perfect, but hey, it’s progress.

Maybe Incremental Improvement is something you want to consider for your web site?