Website design by committee

Do you work with a non-profit group that has a board of directors to whom you report? Then perhaps your board members have ideas about how your group can accomplish their goals better, particularly in marketing. And what about web design? Everybody has their favorite colors, a design element that they saw on another group’s website put in 2003 that they think is great or an idea about how to recognize volunteers right on the front page.

But before you put your website design into a consensus process with a group any bigger than two people, consider what Seth Godin has to say in “If committees told the truth”:

“Hi, we’re here to take your project to places you didn’t imagine.

With us on board, your project will now take three times as long.

It will cost five times as much.

And we will compromise the art and the vision out of it, we will make it reasonable and safe and boring.”

Great work is never reasonable, safe or boring. Thanks anyway.