If you’re a small business owner, you are all too familiar with the drill. Search Google for “Best web designer Melbourne, FL”, or what ever your local area is, and hope you pick a good one. Then you hire an agency, have your your website designed, built and sit back and hope it converts traffic. Then in 2 years, you’ll have to start the process over again. The problem with the old method of website design is that there are way to many variables built into the process. While hope is an amazing thing, you shouldn’t stake the success of your business on it.
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- 13 Facts That Prove Growth Driven Web Design Is Your Best Option
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So what makes growth driven design different? Simply put, it produces better results. By starting with a better process, you will get a better website that grows to meet your prospect’s needs. Traditional web design on average cost a small business $5000 or more. It usually takes 3 months to get the site up and more importantly is not driven by any data, only a hypothesis. Not to mention, most projects go over budget and fail to launch on time.
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Websites should be living and breathing!
How many times have you stumbled upon a website and thought “I really like all the flash and animated GIFs!”‚Ķ NEVER! Sites that are static are dead and so is the traffic coming to them. A good website is one that grows with its users and meets their needs. After all, your site is not for you, it’s for your visitors!
What the difference between the Growth Driven Web Design & the Designer Driven Process?
To help better grasp and understand this next part we are going to break it down into four phases. The four phases we are going to cover are the planning phase, development phase, the learning phase and the transfer phase. Each of these phases are critical to the creation of a website that is driven by growth.
The Planning Phase:
We’ve a seen those cheesy posters with a cat clinging to a tree limb with the inscription “A failure to plan, is a plan to fail.” As corny as it is, the truth in that statement is huge. What sets growth driven apart is that the planning phase focuses more on setting goals around the user and less around styling. This phase is all about collecting the data we have, both marketing and sales, and putting it to work. There is also additional research done around the buyer persona and what things they are looking for in a website. The two final components of this stage are critical. The development of a “wish list” and then prioritizing that list in order to set the foundation for developing your design cycle.
The Development Phase:
Here’s where you get you hands dirty. In this phase we put all of the research and data we gathered into action. In the traditional design process, many agencies spend very little time in the planning phase and a majority of the time in the development phase. Because not enough of the right planning was done upfront this is often where most projects stall and end up costing more.
The Learning Phase:
After we’ve planned, developed, and started driving traffic to our new site, it’s time to learn. We look at the data and as a result we can either verify our assumptions or kill them off and refocus. It’s important to track and keep track of your progress. That is the only way you will know whether or not what you are doing is working.
The Transfer Phase:
This is what really sets growth driven design apart. With your traditional web design job, once your site is up and running the process is complete. With growth driven design the process keeps going. The transfer phase is where we compile all of the data and transfer what we’ve learned into action. We make the recommendation for additions or changes to the site and then start the process all over again.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results. The only way to change the result is to change the process. This is exactly what our agency is doing. After looking at the data we’ve concluded that our site is not generating the conversion results we want. Instead of trying the same traditional process, we’ve opted for a better process. Over the next week we will roll out our new launch pad site and begin the growth driven design process ourselves. We plan to document and blog as we go, so stay tuned on our progress.
