Growth-Driven Design: An Alternative to Traditional Website Design

If you’ve managed a website redesign process recently, you might have come away with the impression that traditional website design is broken. It’s definitely a reasonable feeling if you experienced any (or all) of the following:

• Site launch date delayed by weeks (or months)
• Budget overruns
• “Wish list” features that had to be left out of the site for time or budget reasons

In fact, if you’ve experienced multiple website redesigns in your career, you may have given up the concept of launching a site “on-time and on-budget” altogether.

In addition, you’ve likely fallen into a routine of working 3-6 months to launch a site, only to see the once shiny new state-of-the-art website sit stagnant 3-5 years without any major functional improvements. At the end of the cycle, you kick-start the redesign process all over again and follow the same pattern.

Doesn’t the time between site redesigns feel like a potential missed opportunity to learn from your users’ browsing habits and serve them the best possible experience?

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way. Growth-Driven Design was created specifically to address these pitfalls of the traditional website design process. Growth-Driven Design is built around three core phases:

1. Strategy – Much like traditional website design, Growth-Driven Design is all about understanding your audience and how you can solve their problems.
2. Launch Pad – The Launch Pad is a fully functioning website that looks and performs better than what you have today, but it is not a final product. It will become the foundation for your future website growth.
3. Continuous Improvement – Once the Launch Pad site is live, it can be used to immediately collect user data so that you begin to identify high-impact website improvements that can help spark business growth.

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The key to Growth-Driven Design is learning based on real data from your users (rather than solely basing design decisions on assumptions about your audience) and allowing those learnings to drive improvements to your website. With this approach, the faster that a Launch Pad site goes live, the better. As mentioned above, it won’t be a final product; however, it will be better than the site you have today, and it can offer invaluable insights into user behavior after launch.

Those insights can then be leveraged to determine which of your initial “wish list” features make the most sense to incorporate into the site in the next continuous improvement cycle (often on a quarterly basis).

What type of results can you expect with Growth-Driven Design? Rather than seeing an initial bump and then a slow leveling off of traffic and leads that can be common with traditional web design, Growth-Driven Design aims to offer continual improvement over time. Take a look at the chart below to see those trends already starting to show just six months after launch.

Source: HubSpot

A new website is typically one of your largest marketing expenses, and has the potential to be your greatest marketing asset when combined with a sound strategy. By taking a continuous improvement approach to the web design process, you can ensure that this asset is keeping pace with your customers’ changing needs in the coming months and years.

Interested in learning more about the Growth-Driven Design process? Marcum Strategic Marketing is Growth-Driven Design Agency Certified, and we can help you determine how this approach might improve your next website design project. To start the conversation, contact Bob Goricki at 440-772-0182 or fill out our contact form here.