Growth-Driven Design: The Future of Your Website
Did you know most website developers and designers recommend redesigning your website every one to two years as one of their growth strategies? Seems like not a lot of time, but it’s true. As the web environment rapidly grows and changes, so do the behaviours and preferences of its users. That means if you want to keep up with the people who use your website (and trust us, you do) you’ll need to change your website design frequently.
The issue here is that a website redesign can have a timeline of months, and doing this every 730 days or less just doesn’t seem practical. Plus, redesigns have a tendency to go over budget and out of scope causing your organization to spend valuable time and resources.
All of this is compounded by the fact that a redesign is typically entirely based on your brand’s assumptions about your audience, which might not even be accurate, meaning the whole project might end up being pretty much inadequate.
But there is good news. This endless loop of uncertain guesswork redesign can be over for you if embrace one website design strategy: Growth-Driven Design (GDD).
Redesign How You Redesign
Growth-driven design is a much more adaptable approach to web design in which your site is designed not as a “be-all-end-all” finished product, but as a malleable product. It challenges the entire thought process behind redesigning your website every “certain amount of time” by suggesting that websites should instead be continuously evolving to suit user behaviour.
This way, while you are still making assumptions about your audience when you first create the site, instead of being stuck with something that doesn’t work for years, you are able to evolve it when needed.
Now, with GDD, you don’t have to worry about your site sitting stagnant and/losing potential customers to a design that isn’t as usable as they need. Instead, you’re able to test to see what is working and what isn’t with your website design and make changes to continuously connect with your site’s users.
How Can You Start Using a GDD?
The process of creating a website with a growth-driven design starts with a lot of research, particularly on personas and keywords. While you do have the ability to evolve your website as time goes on, you still want to try to get the best possible experience for your users to start with. Of course, this research is followed by the same elements of a traditional website redesign/launch.
Then comes phase 2 of the GDD process. This is the phase of ongoing development in which you will plan, develop, learn, and share information about your site and how visitors are interacting it.
A great, though widely unknown, benefit of GDD your ability to share the data you gather about user behaviour, and therefore your target audience’s attitudes, with other departments, like sales and product design.
For more comprehensive information on the benefits and process of creating a website using a growth-driven design strategy, download our eBook “Create a Digital Experience that Engages.” As always, feel free to contact Flawless Inbound with any questions.