Why growth-driven design beats traditional website design

In the market for a new b2b website, but doing everything you can to avoid starting the process? We don't blame you! Website design is enough to strike fear in the hearts of any sensible marketer or business owner.

Website projects can take way more work and  time than they’re supposed to, and can take a pretty sizeable bite out of your budget to boot.

But the process doesn’t have to be so painful. There’s a trick that will cut down the amount of work, time, and money needed AND deliver a much higher-performing website. Seriously.

The secret lies in an approach known as growth-driven design.

Read on for the full rundown on why growth-driven design beats the traditional website design process and how it all works.

But first things first:

What is growth-driven design?

Traditional website design can be a high-risk bet with terrible odds. You’re investing significant time and money upfront, but in the end, most decisions are largely based on guesswork and untested assumptions. Then, after all that work, you just sit back and hope the website will do its job.

Meanwhile, the website sits there for maybe two or even three years, steadily collecting cobwebs and becoming increasingly outdated until the time comes for its next major overhaul. And the entire tedious process repeats itself ad nauseam.

This seems an odd way to treat one of your most important marketing and sales assets, right?

Growth-driven design (or GDD) turns all this on its head, by:

• Minimising the risks of late delivery and blown-out costs
• Producing better results through learning and continuous improvement
• Ensuring the entire business reaps the benefits of user learnings by encouraging more collaboration between departments, particularly sales and marketing

Here’s how it works in a nutshell:

Rather than a lengthy build time, as is the case with traditional website design, a bare-essentials website is built and launched in just one month.

Once the website is live, ongoing data analysis on how the website is performing, in real-time and based on actual users, is then fed back into the website in regular sprints. This means the website constantly improves and adapts to current conditions and markets.

The result? A much higher-impacting website in a fraction of the time.

Why is growth-driven design better than traditional website design?

As you can probably already start to see, there are many advantages to a GDD approach:

• Growth-driven design is much more flexible than traditional website design. By continuously updating your website, you can quickly adapt to changing trends and user preferences.
• Gone are the days of agonising over minor details like the placement of call-to-action buttons. With growth-driven design, you can make swift decisions, test them out, and adjust as needed, all while your website is already hard at work for you.
  • The investment in growth-driven design is much more manageable compared to traditional website design. Rather than a hefty upfront cost, you can spread out the expenses into more manageable monthly increments. This approach not only saves you money but also allows for ongoing improvements based on real user data, leading to better results month on month.
  • Growth-driven design encourages a data-oriented approach. By using concrete user data instead of guesswork, you can continuously refine and enhance your website's performance.

How does growth-driven design work?

GDD is typically done in three stages:

Stage 1: Strategy

The first stage is about building a solid foundation for your website. This includes setting out your goals and objectives for the website and creating comprehensive buyer personas that give you a deep understanding of your users’ motivations and pain points.

If you already have a website, this stage will also include a detailed website audit, which will give you key insights into where your users are currently coming from, how they are interacting with your site, and why they’re engaging or dropping off.

After all this information gathering, it’s time to brainstorm a wish list of every feature and function you’d want the website to have. Once you have your list, perform an 80/20 analysis – that is, determine which 20% of your wishlist will deliver 80% of the impact.

The list can then be whittled down further by determining which of those features and functions are must-haves, and which are just nice-to-haves that can wait for the next monthly sprint cycle. What’s left will make up the framework of your first iteration of your new website.

Stage 2: Launch pad

The second stage is where you build and launch your website (typically the final step in the traditional website design process). This is where the typical website design work happens, including things like:

• Designing content and messaging
• Information architecture
• Wireframing and design
• Programming and development
• Simple UX testing
  
  The idea is to quickly launch a highly functioning website in a relatively short amount of time, so you can get the site into users’ hands and start collecting data.

While this valuable data is being gathered, there’s no reason to sit on your hands – you can immediately start monitoring the performance of the site, looking at things like organic traffic, heatmaps and bounce rates, and making immediate updates based on initial user feedback.

Stage 3: Continuous improvement

• Plan: To determine your goals in this month’s sprint cycle, compare your performance against the goals you outlined in your strategy. Identify any items on your nice-to-have wishlist that could be initiated, and consult with marketing and sales to see if any new learnings could be applied (e.g. if a recent blog post resonated with users, this might influence the messaging on the website).
• Build: Once you’ve created your plan, it’s time to execute. Don’t forget to set up validation tracking codes to measure success metrics and develop marketing campaigns to drive traffic to the new pages and features.
• Learn: Here’s where you reflect on the changes and determine if they have achieved the desired effect. Review all the data to help you decide whether or not your hypotheses have been confirmed.
• Transfer: This is where you share what you’ve learned with the rest of the company, particularly sales and marketing, to ensure the entire business continues working towards the same objectives.

Don’t let one of your most important marketing and sales assets grow stagnant. With a growth-driven design approach, you’ll quickly develop a website that is, as Tyra Banks would say, next-level fierce!