Recently I chatted with Richard Pascoe on FIVEaa about a new approach to website development I’ve been quietly perfecting. Here’s why it matters for your business.
The moment of clarity arrived after years of watching the same pattern repeat itself from time to time.
Small business owners would approach me, determined to finally get their website sorted. They knew their decade-old digital presence was costing them opportunities. They understood their competitors were capturing attention online while they remained invisible. They were absolutely committed to making a change.
And then… nothing would happen.
Projects would stall. Weeks would stretch into months. The website that was “almost ready to launch” would remain perpetually unfinished.
For the record, we’ve launched 1000+ websites, but it’s after reflecting on the dozens of smaller projects that got bogged, I realised we weren’t facing a technology problem. We were facing a deeply human one.
The Psychology of Website Procrastination
As I explained to Richard, I’ve isolated three critical psychological barriers that consistently derail website projects:
1. The Blank Page Problem
“Give us your words,” I would say, thinking I was being helpful.
But for many business owners, this seemingly simple request triggers immediate paralysis. The pressure to articulate everything that makes your business special in perfect, compelling language is overwhelming. Suddenly, sweeping the backyard becomes urgently important.
2. The Deadline Dilemma
In my desire to be accommodating, I’d been reluctant to enforce strict timelines. “Take your time,” I’d say, wanting to be the easy-going consultant rather than a taskmaster.
But without deadlines, projects drift. Other priorities emerge. The website remains in perpetual limbo—not quite abandoned, but never quite completed either.
3. The Perfectionism Trap
“It’s not quite right yet,” becomes the mantra that prevents launch after launch.
There’s always one more competitor to check out, one more tweak to make, one more opinion to seek. This quest for an impossible perfection keeps otherwise excellent websites hidden from the world, generating zero value while sitting on a development server.
Our Evolution’s Embarrassment Failsafe
What’s truly fascinating is the underlying driver behind this procrastination. As I shared with Richard during our chat, humans appear to be evolutionarily hardwired to avoid potential embarrassment at almost any cost.
“We are hardwired to avoid a potential embarrassment,” I explained. “When we’re little kids, we’ll just go… I mean, I saw a video on Facebook recently of an Irish dancer in the streets of Dublin (I talk about this with David Olney in Season 6 Episode 1 of Talking About Marketing). She was tap dancing. A little 3-year-old girl starts doing it, and she’s awesome. And then the little kid looks around. None of the adults or older children are doing it as well and she’s just puzzled, but doesn’t stop her. It gets drummed out of us.”
Think about that for a moment: our natural state as humans is actually uninhibited expression. It takes years of social conditioning to install those filters that stop us from dancing in public or putting our authentic selves forward.
This evolutionary safeguard that helps us avoid social rejection is precisely what makes website projects so difficult. What if my competitors think my content is amateur? What if there’s a typo and people judge me? What if my website doesn’t look as polished as theirs?
These fears aren’t trivial—they tap into deeply rooted survival mechanisms. But they’re also profoundly limiting when it comes to marketing a business.
Learning From Steve Jobs: “Just Ship It”
The solution came from an unexpected source—Steve Jobs and his famous philosophy of “Just ship it.”
As I shared with Richard, there’s a well-known story about Jobs walking through Apple’s engineering department. When the team protested that a new computer wasn’t ready for release, Jobs asked a series of basic questions: “Does it do this? Yes. This? Yes. This? Yes. Ship it.”
The insight is profound: no digital product is ever truly “finished.” Websites are fluid documents that evolve and improve over time. The website that’s 85% perfect and live today creates infinitely more value than the 99% perfect one that never sees the light of day.
Engineering A Solution: Website in a Week
These realisations led me to completely reimagine my approach to small business websites. The result is Website in a Week—a process specifically designed to overcome the psychological barriers that typically derail projects.
Here’s how it works:
- We extract the content directly from your brain through a focused 60-minute interview, rather than asking you to stare at a blank page. I’ll ask targeted questions that get to the heart of what makes your business special, and then transform that conversation into compelling website copy.
- We enforce a strict seven-day timeline from start to finish, creating focused momentum that prevents the project from drifting into limbo.
- We shift the mindset from “perfect” to “continuously improving,” getting your site live quickly with the understanding that websites are never truly finished—they evolve alongside your business.
The results have been remarkable. Projects that previously might have stretched across months are now wrapping up in a single week. Business owners who had been putting off their website for years are finally getting online with professional-quality digital presences.
Is This Approach Right For You?
During my chat with Richard, I couldn’t help but recognise the parallels between website procrastination and other areas of life. Whether it’s who takes out the bins at home or how clothes get from the line to the wardrobe, many of our frustrations stem from processes that aren’t working—not from bad intentions.
Website in a Week might be your solution if:
- You’ve been putting off creating or updating your website for months (or years)
- You find yourself frozen when trying to write about your own business
- You’re tired of feeling embarrassed about sharing your current website
- You want a professional result but don’t have weeks to spare on the process
- The thought of writing your own content makes you want to clean the gutters instead
As I told Richard, this approach isn’t about cutting corners—it’s about recognising the psychological barriers that prevent progress and deliberately engineering them out of the process.
Limited Spots Available
One necessary constraint of this focused approach is that I can only take on three Website in a Week projects each month. This ensures I can give each business the attention it deserves while maintaining the intensive seven-day timeline.
If you’re ready to stop procrastinating and finally get your business the online presence it deserves, you can learn more about the Website in a Week package here or contact me directly to secure your spot.
And as I reminded Richard—there are absolutely no extensions. We ship in seven days, ready or not (though with our process, it’s always ready).
Listen to my full conversation with Richard Pascoe below: