Meet Mr. Redesign. He’s a serious guy and values all things old school. He takes his time and rarely makes changes because he’s deeply rooted in tradition and sticks to the basics. He’s got a bit of an expensive taste, but we won’t hold that against him.
Meet Ms. Marketing. She’s a motivated woman who’s eager to push herself to the next level. She’s quick-witted, responds smartly to even the most obscure requests and is constantly morphing into a new person and seeking to improve herself. She values the new, but appreciates the old. Ms. Marketing is a real people-pleaser.
Mr. Redesign and Ms. Marketing meet, get married and have a baby they affectionately name Growth-Driven Design (don’t judge their name choice). Growth-Driven Design, or GDD for short, is a beautiful combination of both his ma and pops. He appreciates the basics, loves putting himself out there and is quick-witted, eager to please and values a good transformation. Sounds like the ideal family, right?
I hate to burst your bubble, but this family isn’t real (bet I surprised you with that, huh?). While this adorable brood might have tugged at your little inbound marketing heartstrings, it perfectly (albeit, fakely) illustrates the characteristics of Growth-Driven Design. Let me explain.
Humble Beginnings—Traditional Website Redesign
Traditional website redesign. If those words send chills down your spine, you’ve probably been part of a redesign project that was a headache and a half. But why?
Was it because your in-house web designers or web design firm didn’t live up to your expectations? Or were you unhappy with your approach to web design and how your website turned out? We’ll take a look at some of the common gripes of the traditional route.
1) Massive upfront costs with no guarantee: All too often, businesses choose traditional web design and must pay an outrageous amount of money upfront before any work is even done.
2) Significant time investment: In today’s society, we want what we want and we want it yesterday. We want to launch a professional website and improve lead generation and conversions as quickly as possible. Yet, traditional website designs take an average of 3 months to complete (sometimes as long as 6 months). That’s 3-6 months of missed marketing and lead generation opportunities. And, if you’re a small business, or really any business of any size, every week, day, and second counts.
Keep in mind that these traditional website design projects rarely get done in time, or they’re finished at the very last second with little time to spare. If you exhaust your web design budget, you could be stuck with an unfinished website and left to pick up the pieces.
A traditional website design leaves you with no way of knowing if your website will end up being your number one salesperson or your weakest link. You invest significant time and money, say a prayer to the almighty gods of web design, and set your hopes on an uncertain future. And, after all that, your website may end up tanking and not delivering the results you hoped for.
But what if there was a cure to these web design growing pains—a way to continuously improve your website over time and keep it from becoming quickly irrelevant and antiquated? You may be thinking this sounds too good to be true, and it was until Growth-Driven Design took the world by storm.
The Revolution—Growth-Driven Design
Traditional website redesign is filled with risks, but Growth-Driven Design mitigates these risks via a more strategic approach. If you’re looking to accelerate the redesign process, and design a website that provides continued value, then Growth-Driven Design is exactly what you’re looking for.
Imagine Growth-Driven Design as a series of little sprints, rather than an exhausting marathon (with no free beer or an awesome t-shirt). Growth-Driven Design focuses on making informed decisions based on testing and visitor behavior. GDD allows for businesses to continuously change its marketing plan and grow and adapt.
Think of it this way. Would you go buy a car just because it looks nice? Or would you tirelessly research the safety of the car, the comfort, the brand, the cost before test driving and eventually making a purchase? I’d be willing to bet a bag of Doritos that you’d say the latter.
So, why would you enter into a website redesign project without conducting extensive research and understanding the merits of each design approach?
So, How Does Growth-Driven Design Work?
Growth-Driven Design and traditional website redesign projects begin the same way—with strategy and goal setting.
1) Craft intricately detailed buyer personas: Develop buyer personas—semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers developed through market research and real customer data—by sending surveys to customers, mining your existing customer data and gaining insight from your salespeople. Use these buyer personas to plan your website redesign and create a fully functional website with their interests, challenges and needs in mind.
2) Perform an audit of your current website: Conduct research to discover how prospects are using your site, what they’re doing when they’re on your site and why they’re bouncing. Heatmapping is a great way to study website visitors’ behavior and identify trends, hot spots and overlooked areas on your website. When redesigning your website, keep this behavioral data top of mind. Repeat what’s doing well and improve sections of your website that are underperforming.
3) Build a list of redesign essentials: Create a list of tasks to tackle during your website redesign. What do you hope to achieve during redesign? Where is your website sorely lacking? Your list could include module redesign, new navigation features, functionality and even the addition of pages that will further explain your brand and help convert your visitors.
Your top priorities should be any web design elements that directly impact conversion rates or improve user experience. Remember that this to-do list isn’t set in stone. It will evolve and fluctuate as your redesign progresses and priorities change. You may put some items on a back burner or decide they’re not worth spending time on at all.
What’s great about Growth-Driven Design projects is they launch quickly (typically within a month of beginning the project), so the real data collection process can begin almost immediately. If you don’t launch your website, you can’t gather live, useable data to fuel and enlighten the rest of your website redesign project. Websites aren’t like an 80’s-style perm—a set it and forget it style. They’re more a rinse and repeat process with continuous, well-informed growth.
After launching a website, you’ll enter phase two of your Growth-Driven Design project. You’ll begin to form hypotheses to gather crucial metrics for your redesign project. Over the next 11 months or so, you will:
- Plan what changes need to be made
- Develop deliverables and targeted marketing campaigns and track the results and website traffic
- Learn how the user works and what they are thinking
- Share what you’ve learned with the appropriate people/team
Growth-Driven Design isn’t a linear process, but a continuous cycle revolving around your buyer personas.
If you’re the victim of a traditional website redesign project that went awry, or your website isn’t generating the leads, conversions and ROI you expected, you’re probably in search of the right folks to do the job. The team at Stratus Interactive is jam-packed with design and development experts ready to take your website to the next level. Chat with us today to learn how we can help you design a website that consistently gets better with time!
