Designing a website takes a lot of work.
You have to invest around 1-3 months of your time and about $15,000 to $80,000 for it.
However, there is an approach that will cut down on these two without sacrificing functionality and performance and that is by using growth-driven web design.
What is growth-driven design?
Growth-driven design (GDD) is a systematic website design and maintenance approach that helps in minimising the risks of traditional web design. This shortens the time to launch the website by focusing on the actual impact as well as continuous learning and improvement.
With the growth-driven design, you’ll be able to launch your website in as short as one month. Once it goes live, real-time and ongoing data analysis on how the website is performing is then fed back into the website in regular sprints, which is based on actual users. This means the website is constantly improving and continuously adapting to current conditions and markets.
Advantages of growth-driven website
Using a growth-driven design will let you enjoy the following benefits:
- Minimise the risks of late delivery and blown-out costs
- Produce better results through learning and continuous improvement
- Promotes collaboration between departments, particularly sales and marketing
- Flexible and responsive to changes in trends.
- Requires less time to launch
- The cost can be paid in monthly increments rather than upfront.
- Data-driven functionality allows you to continuously improve your website and track ROI.
- Capable of informing you how users behave which is helpful in improving marketing and sales strategies
- Learnings and insights gained from other campaigns can be applied to the website almost immediately to help facilitate collaboration between departments.
- Gives you an amazing website that puts you ahead of your competitors
The stages of growth-driven design
GDD undergoes three stages namely Strategy, Launch Pad, and Continuous Improvement. Here is an in-depth view of each stage:
1. Strategy stage
During this stage, you set out your objectives and create your buyer personas which includes customer demographics, behaviour patterns, motivations, and goals. This will help you in understanding your users’ motivations and pain points which is crucial in setting a solid foundation for your website.
For existing websites, a detailed audit needs to be undertaken to get key information about where your users are coming from, how they are interacting with your site, and why they’re engaging or heading elsewhere.
Once you have all this information, perform the Pareto Principle and make an 80/20 analysis of every feature and function you want the website to have. 20% of these must deliver 80% of the impact you desire. It is also important that you prioritise your website needs and set the wants aside, at least until the next monthly sprint cycle.
2. Launch pad stage
The launch pad is typically the final step in the traditional website design process but with the GDD, this is the stage where you begin the standard work. What do you perform here?
- Design the content and messages
- Construct the information architecture
- COme up with the wireframe and design
- Start the programming and development
- Perform simple UX testing
The goal at this stage is to create a highly functioning website in a relatively short amount of time and quickly launch it. Once you get the site into users’ hands, you can start monitoring the performance of the site, look at the organic traffic, heatmaps, and bounce rates. With this data, you can immediately make updates based on initial user feedback.
3. Continuous improvement stage
This is the stage where you start turning all the user data into updates and your website into a lead-converting machine. It is done in monthly sprint cycles making GDD different from traditional website design.
The three steps in the monthly sprint cycle
The monthly sprint cycle goes through four steps. These include:
1. Planning
In this cycle, you compare your performance against the goals you outlined in Stage 1. It might be the right time to initiate the wants you previously identified in the strategy stage. It is also a good idea to consult with marketing and sales to see if there are any new learnings that could be applied on the website.
2. Building
Here, you put your plan into effect. Make sure to set up validation tracking codes so you can measure success metrics, and develop marketing campaigns to drive traffic to the new pages and features.
3. Learning
Here’s where you track if the changes you applied achieved your desired effect. It will then help you learn more about your user and confirm your hypotheses.
3. Transfering
In order to ensure that the entire organisation is on the same page, you need to transfer everything you have learned to them especially to the sales and marketing team.
Your website is the most important marketing and sales tool that you have. Making use of the growth-driven design approach will easily bring you to the next level and help you achieve your goals.
