Growth-Driven Design is a revolution for the modern website design industry. It provides a process and structure for businesses that are launching or re-designing their website.

But what exactly is it? Growth-Driven Design is a smarter approach to website design. It alleviates the stress and shortcomings of traditional design. There is no large initial capital investment or a large obligation of your company’s time. It is developed to maximize results, to understand the website users better, and to continuously improve the site based on what we learn.

The first stage of Growth-Driven Design is strategy. When it comes to marketing and website design, strategy should always come first. During this phase, we review the goals and aspirations for the site. We create user personas, which we will discuss more in-depth next week, and discuss fundamental assumptions about our users to create journey or empathy map for them. We review a global, overall strategy and create a wish list for the new website with 75 to 200 items on it.

Once we complete the strategy stage, we move on to develop a launch pad website. A launch pad website is a new website that looks and performs better than your current website. It is a scaled down version with only the core elements and content upon launch. Why? Because there is no such thing as a perfect website. Let’s launch a nicer, better site and see how users interact with it. We also want to get feedback from those early users and tweak it based on their wants and needs. The first two stages combined should only take 45 to 60 days. Again, we want to launch quickly and learn so we can improve.

Now that we have completed our launch pad site, we move on to our third stage: continuous improvement. In this stage, we learn what our users want, transfer that knowledge to our team and plan how to improve the site. We compile user data and feedback and incorporate it into a plan to improve the website each and every cycle. The cycle can be any number of weeks, but ideally, it would be somewhere around four to seven weeks. You will need time to review the findings, create a plan, build out the changes and give them time to be tested.

Next week, we will dig into the details of the strategy stage – particularly on the topic of persona development. Using personas may be the best thing you can do for your marketing. It will help you truly discover your most effective audiences, making it easier to speak directly to them.

Want to know more about Growth-Driven Design or website development? Shoot me an email at jp@wespeakeasy.com.