If you’re considering a website redesign to better serve your clients, we’d like to introduce you to an approach you may not be familiar with. At Gate 39 Media, we follow a strategy known as Growth-Driven Design. We also think there are some pretty compelling reasons you should look at inbound marketing agencies that apply this approach versus a purely traditional web design service.
So, what is growth-driven design? And why should you care?
Essentially, growth-driven design is a way to launch or relaunch a website in a fraction of the time it usually takes using a standard web design workflow. That, in itself, is an exciting prospect, as commercial web design is typically an arduous, stressful, costly, and lengthy undertaking with no guarantees that your new property will perform the way you would like.
But you need your new site to perform.
It needs to convert, generate leads, and deliver insights to help you grow. You also want to include features and enhancements that your site visitors will genuinely appreciate. These decisions need to be based on data, not just a designer’s idea of what’s cool and trendy, and that, in a nutshell, is what growth-driven design is all about.
Why Your Business Website Needs Growth-Driven Design
When you think about the last time you were involved in a website redesign, what do you remember? Did it launch on time? Did it come in on budget? Did everything work the way you envisioned it at the outset?
Was the design agency (or designer) easy to work with? On top of your requests? Proactive? Transparent? Collaborative?
Aside from the initial barrage of expletives, and even if it turned out fine in the end, we’d wager you’re not keen on jumping into the process again.
The truth is most web design projects take much longer than initially quoted. They often run over budget, and the cost is high. Then, once the site is launched, there are no significant updates for a couple of years, on average. You don’t know how it’s going to perform until after the fact, and at that point, you’re not going to backtrack and fix the problems, especially if you don’t know what they are.
But what if the web development process was more agile? What if the objective was user-focused and designed to provide your organization with data you could then leverage to improve even further?
We follow a proven process and our growth-driven design starts with planning, research, and strategy. Of course, you’ll have a wish list, but it’s critical to know where your old site is not delivering—and what your customers want.
It All Starts with Strategy
The first phase is strategy. We’ll outline your goals for the project, look at how your old site met or did not meet these goals, and discuss customer personas to represent all the types of users you expect to serve.
Personas are a critical aspect of the strategy phase and will set the tone for everything that comes next. It’s essential to know your customer’s pain points before you can solve them, as only then can we put ourselves in their shoes and design a solution that works for them.
Analytics and research are next, as we need to know what’s good and bad about your current site. Once we know this, it’s easier to pinpoint areas that need improvement and craft solutions to accomplish that goal.
Taking everything we’ve learned so far, we then develop some fundamental assumptions about your site users, such as what devices they’ll be using to access your website and what products, services, and information they’re looking for while they’re there. These assumptions form the basis of the page and overall design strategy and will also inform subsequent cycles.
Your Wish List
Our design team will sit down with you and brainstorm a wish list of every idea and feature you’d like to have on your new site. We’ll talk about marketing, tools, design, international customers, new markets, future plans, and how various scenarios might change the user experience. Your priorities will likely change over time, but it’s a place to start. Think of your wish list as a living, agile document. It will change, and that’s expected.
Launch Pad
Finally, we’ll go live with an initial iteration of the website. This is your launch pad site and will feature the highest priority items on your wish list. As it evolves, you’ll learn more about your users, and we’ll continue to improve it to make the experience top-notch.
The launch pad site leads us into the design cycle, where we add more features, enable continuous improvement, and align user motivations to the site’s features and design.
What Comes Next?
There are, of course, several more steps in the process. Still, the general cycle of growth-driven design is clear: we plan, develop, learn, and transfer what we’ve learned to support the next iteration, continually improve the user experience, and deliver a website design that advances your business objectives and grows with you.
Insights are gained through user data that can then be leveraged to improve performance on an ongoing basis. And while you’ll have a new website much faster than you would with a traditional web design process, your site won’t sit stagnant for years until you spring for another redesign. We’ll continue to iterate and improve based on actual user data, building on your successes and gaining deep insights into your audience and their motivations.
VIEW OUR WEBSITE DESIGN PORTFOLIO
Rounding Up the Benefits of Growth-Driven Design
Hopefully, we’ve given you a glimpse into our web design approach and why we feel growth-driven design is superior. Let’s break down the benefits:
- Budget-friendly: instead of shelling out tens of thousands on a site redesign that might end up costing you more than you anticipated, you’ll pay a predictable monthly fee.
- Timelines are accelerated: you’ll have a functional website in a fraction of the time, and we’ll continue to iterate and improve it based on real user data.
- Measurable results: we apply data at every phase of the project, measuring results against your business goals and adjusting our approach to ensure continuous growth.
- Dynamic asset: because testing and analysis are ongoing, features and design aspects that underperform can be tweaked, changed, or removed entirely.
- Scalable, repeatable: enable seamless, scalable, predictable business growth into new markets or new customer segments.
- Goal-oriented: many websites are created and launched without any quantifiable goals and let the chips fall where they may. On the other hand, growth-driven design uses your business goals as the basis for the design.
Design for Your Bottom Line
Every decision you make for your business matters. Every tool, strategy, and person you bring on board needs to contribute to the company’s growth and prosperity. If you’re considering a website redesign, you need to approach it with those thoughts in mind.
We firmly believe that your website should work for you, and we’re here to make that happen. We follow growth-driven design in our WordPress website projects, and our designers hold the Growth-Driven Design HubSpot Certification.
Set up a call today to speak to us about your website relaunch. We’d love to chat more about growth-driven design and show you some examples of our past work and how it’s driven sustainable growth for our clients.
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