When you’ve got a new product or service you believe will change the world—or at least your industry—naturally, you’re excited. And it’s tempting to slip into exaggeration about what you can or will do—but don’t.

Presenting goals as facts, stating best-case scenarios without qualification, hyperbole (“best,” “cleanest,” “most advanced”), and other forms of exaggeration are credibility killers.

Why? They trigger BS detectors, subjecting you to extra scrutiny. When people realize the statement is not quite true, they’ll doubt everything else you say. And they set you up for failure if you can’t deliver the best case.

Stay credible and create confidence in your enterprise by making the strongest claims that you can support. Don’t say you’ll have product on the market next year unless you absolutely know you will—give a conservative target date, and explain (briefly) what needs to happen for you to meet it. And don’t say your technology delivers the “world’s lowest emissions” or some such unless you’re prepared to back it up with an honest comparison of your performance with everyone else’s.

In short: if you can prove it, say it; if not, don’t.

The site Thinkshift just launched for the California Natural Gas Vehicle Coalition is a great example of making the most of your resources to create a site that serves current needs, allows room to grow, and requires minimal maintenance.

The Coalition had a limited budget, but urgently needed an updated site with new everything—content, design, and architecture. The new site has a strong focus, delivers substantial information, and is easy to maintain. The keys to making this project work:

Focus on key needs. A tight budget means a tight (small, targeted, concise) site—you can’t address everything. The Coalition is a member-based advocacy organization, so we focused on supporting advocacy priorities, promoting membership, and serving members. Period.

Use what you have. We were able to adapt copy written for a previous legislator information packet to create the “Why NGVs?” section. Without this running start, the organization would not have been able to provide such robust information.

Keep the design simple. Most of us love a bit of flash (or Flash), but when you’re on a budget, you need to keep your design specifications clean and focus on the user experience (rather than impressing people with flourishes). Even on a budget, you can get a good-looking, audience-appropriate, user-centered site as long as you are disciplined about limiting your options. Focusing on what’s going to make the site easiest and most engaging for users spurs creative, economical solutions.

Build for the future. The site architecture is extremely simple, with only five top-level navigation categories that are broad enough to accommodate all anticipated additions over the next several years. The site can grow deeper with ease, without changing the basic structure. A front-page feature and secondary navigation let us bring deep information to the fore when appropriate, without disturbing the simplicity of the home page.

Account for maintenance upfront. We addressed maintenance in our site creative brief—there’s no point in building a site you don’t have the capacity to maintain, and even the simplest site needs a maintenance plan. Without one, updates are likely to be sporadic, and effectiveness will nosedive.

Changing behavior is tough—as anyone who’s ever tried to follow through on a New Year’s resolution knows. That’s why when you do get people fired up to change, you want them to be able to act on that impulse right away.

This poses a communications challenge for some sectors of the green economy. The point arose recently during a roundtable discussion at CALSTART’s Jan. 14-15 Target 2030: Solutions to Secure California’s Transportation and Energy Future conference that asked, “Is the consumer sufficiently motivated to cut transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions? What more should be done to motivate the consumer?”

The real question in many cases is, are we ready to motivate the consumer?

John DeCicco, Environmental Defense Fund senior fellow for automotive strategies, made the point about cutting-edge clean fuels and vehicles. Many of these are proof-of-concept “science projects,” he said. “I really fear talking them up, and doing education before they are available. I fear we’ve squandered a lot of public good will by trying to market things that are not going to be available until years from now.”

The same is true of some options that are technologically ready: We need to promote public transportation—and make sure it can deliver by investing in it. We need public policies that so strongly favor transit-centered growth that it’s irresistible, enabling people to live in locations that allow reduced driving. And so on.

A lot of hype attached to products that may or may not become available as advertised only breeds consumer cynicism (think computer vaporware) and tune-out. And bad experiences with poorly supported current options can sour people on some of our best approaches for a long, long time.

Motivating people is hard enough; don’t disappoint them when they’re primed for change.