Better to not to perfect something if the time to complete it will double in length. It’s good to allow a “version 1″ of your project out the door rather than losing the opportunity to have the project launch at all. (Concept stolen from 43folders and Guy Kawasaki but not necessarily in that order.)

I remember back to my “large company days” – our websites did a great job of offering info on compliance, financial reports and the management team. They all failed terribly at telling folks what the heck we did. I found a few things were prevalent:

1. The more info that was crammed into the site, the better management seemed to think it was.

2. The wording was so vague and complex that it really defeated the purpose of the website all together.

3. The offering of services was so vast that it seemed unlikely that we were really good at any services listed.

To combat this, we decided to put up a video that would graphically illustrate our “datacenter locator service” so anyone could grasp our model which is the matching of datacenter providers with potential clients at no charge to the client.  This was back in February of last year and we did our best with the resources we had at hand. Here’s the “v1″ video:

(direct link here)

The content was ok but the colors were a bit pale making the graphics unreadable. We also recorded the video at different times so you can tell that the tempo and pitch changed between recording sessions.

Deciding to redo the video here’s what we came up with:

(direct link here)

We’re much happier with this version of the video for sure. Within 1 minute 49 seconds most folks in the industry will understand what we do.  The dots concept we used came from Jeff who specializes at modeling complexity with dots.