Your website can feel like a drop in the ocean of the world wide web. A traditionally designed website can quickly become irrelevant in the face of constant tech advancements. How do you keep your website automated and relevant so that it stands the test of time? Growth Driven Design is a data-driven process that saves you from having to reinvent your website every 2 to 3 years. GDD integrates processes allowing your site to grow over time and keep up with shifting marketplace trends.
Website Competition
How many websites are there in the world? According to the internet, there are about 1.5 billion websites. Only about 200 million websites are active. Luckily, your business is pretty niche. You don't have 200 million random websites competing for your business, regardless of what your business is. For example, let's pretend you train Red-tailed Hawks. That is a pretty unique niche.
If we do a Google search for Red-tailed Hawk trainers, there are about 7,450,000 results competing for the term. 7.5 million is a lot of competition.
Not continually improving your website is like running a mile to prepare for a marathon. You're never going to win the marathon because you will not be able to compete in the long game, which brings us to the process of website design and development.
There are two basic strategies to web design: the traditional approach of building the website and letting it sit for two or three years, and a newer approach called growth-driven design which allows you to improve your website over time and stay in the marathon.
Growth Driven Design
Let's look at the traditional website design process and how it correlates with Growth Driven Design.
The process starts when someone decides they need a website. You go through planning, design, and development process and bam, a website is launched into the world. Three or four years go by and somebody says, “Oh, we need to build a new website because ours is out of date.”
So, you go through a one to three-month planning, design, development process and a new website is launched. Two to three years later somebody says, “We need to build a new website because ours is out of date.”
You go through the one to three-month planning, design, development process, and, again, a new website is launched. This rinse and repeat happen again and again until the end of time. This is the traditional website design process.
With Growth Driven Design your website is not neglected for years on end. Features and functionality for growth are defined, designed, and built into the website and it continuously improves over time. Meaning your website, which should be your number one sales and marketing tool and your number one revenue generator, is continually improving over time generating leads and growing revenue for your business.
A Growth Driven Design Hypothesis
Let's take a look at the growth driven design flywheel. We start off with a foundation or a launchpad website. This is sometimes built out of the gate or your existing website serves as a perfect foundation. This starting place is what we grow from.
Next, we follow the flywheel. We observe user behavior. We look at Google analytics and study heat maps to understand what people are doing on the website.
Then we make a growth hypothesis. What can we do to make the user experience more efficient on our website? What metric do we want to move? We implement our hypothesis. If it works perfectly, it is built into the foundation website. If it doesn't work, we ask, “What can we do to improve it?”
The point is we know, based on the data, whether or not our hypothesis was successful.
What is a growth driven design hypothesis?
Here is an example.
Adding the phone number to the product and checkout page will increase phone calls and conversion rates. What user behavior backed this hypothesis? Looking at Google Analytics, we found on one client's website. The sessions with phone calls were converting at 3% while sessions without phone calls were converting at 1%. That's what led us to add the phone number to the product pages and also on the checkout pages. This was a successful hypothesis. Check out conversion rates increase to 1.2%. Overall order value increased by $72.
No matter who you decide to go with for a website redesign project, make sure they understand the benefits of growth-driven design and how it can turn your user data into actionable projects that will keep your website automated and relevant so that it stands the test of time.
