What is Growth Driven Design?
Growth-Driven Design is the new gold standard for building websites that deliver results.
It minimizes the pitfalls of traditional web design and produces high-performing websites that will always be one step ahead of your competition.
Growth-Driven Design is all about making small incremental changes to your website based on visitor behaviour. We constantly research, test and learn about your visitors to inform on-going website improvements, focusing on real impact.
| Traditional Web Design | Growth-Driven Design | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Large One-Time Cost (ex $15,000) | One initial project fee a regular retainer fee (ex. $7000 followed by $2000/month) |
| Over-Budget Risk | High | Low |
| Time to First site | 3-6 months | 1-3 months |
| Flexibility | Not Flexible | Flexible |
| Results | Maybe Good? | Constantly Improving |
| Frequency of Updates | Two or Three times a decade | Every Month or Quarter |
What’s wrong with traditional web design
In the early days of the web, putting up a website, and leaving it untouched for years was perfectly fine. Just being on the web put you ahead of everyone else. That is no longer the case
What we have come to accept as the standard way we approach building and maintaining a website is riddled with systemic risk and is costing your business time, money and opportunity.
Here are just some of the problems:
Large Up-Front Cost
Expensive
If you’re looking for a quality, well-built site – you’re probably looking at a few thousand dollars. This is a huge cost for small or medium sized business – it’s hard to budget for, and it’s hard to justify without knowing what kind of impact it will have on your business.
Easy to go Over Budget
Over Budget
Not all traditional website projects go to plan and often go over budget. This can often stall, or even worse end a web development project – it can also lead to damaged relationships between you and your web agency.
Long Process
Months
Depending on how complex your website will be, you are looking at anywhere from 3 months to 6 months of development. If you’re launching a new business – that’s time that you’re not making money with your website.
Not Flexible
Locked In
If your business changes throughout the course of the development and your web agency is working to a specific scope of work, it can often lead to additional, unbudgeted expenses. It can also further delay the delivery of your site. The traditional process is not flexible.
No Guarantees
No Guarantees – Only Guesses
How do you know you will get the results that you want? With traditional web design, you don’t. Hopefully the agency building your website has done all the research that they need, but all they can do is work with their best guesses. If they are wrong – or if they didn’t even bother to do the research, then you can end up with a website that hurts your business for years.
No Updates
< Never Changes
When was the last time you updated your website? 1, 2, 5 years? More? Most websites never get any major updates after they launch. There may be some small minor edits, but for the most part they sit untouched for years, until something happens to force a redesign.
How Growth-Driven Design minimizes the risks
One of the main goals of Growth-Driven Design is to minimize the risks associated with getting your website live.
Lower initial costs
Lower Upfront Costs
Growth-Driven Design has a different pricing structure than traditional web design. Rather than paying a large fee for a completed project – regardless of its actual value to your company – Growth-Driven Design starts with an initial fee – almost always less than a traditional website would cost, followed by a regular (monthly or quarterly) retainer. While it does cost more over time, you get better results and more value. It is also makes it easier to budget for.
No Going Over Budget
Always on Budget
Because you aren’t paying for a final finished product, but rather for a process of continual improvement, we work on tasks that we can accomplish, and will have the biggest impact. If there isn’t enough in the budget to complete it, we can always complete it the following cycle, or simply use some of the budget from the next cycle. If we find that this is a regular occurrence though, than we may need to renegotiate the retainer amount – however this won’t come as a surprise, and it won’t stall or kill your project.
Short Iterations
Short Development Cycles
Growth-Driven Design isn’t about getting everything done all at once, it’s about focusing on the core, and working to make small, and continual improvements. While you may not get a website that is as complete right away, it does get you online and getting results much faster.
Flexible
It’s Meant to be Updated
Since we work with short iterations, we are better able to accommodate any changes. They simply get added to the list of what needs to get done, and they’ll get completed at the next iteration. While it may delay some other tasks, these kind of changes is what Growth-Driven Design is all about.
Focus on Results
Commitment to Results
Just like traditional design, we might not always get it right. The difference is that if something doesn’t work, we can change it. You are never stuck with a website that doesn’t perform. Since our focus is on results we will keep making changes until we are convinced that you have the best performing website possible – and then we’ll try to improve it more.
Frequent Updates
Always Improving
New google update? No problem. New technological must have? Sure thing. The beauty of Growth-Driven Design is that you will always be ahead of your competition when it comes to online trends. While they wait for their next redesign to catch up, you’re already there – and if that trend is a flop, they’re stuck with it, you’re not.
The Growth-Driven Design Cycle
Growth-Driven Design has 4 stages per cycle. Plan, Develop, Learn and Transfer. In theory once a cycle is complete, you repeat it, however in practice it’s not uncommon to have a few cycles going at the same time, as it can take time to get enough meaningful data to complete the learning stage.
Plan
Creating Tasks
In the planning stage we go over any previous Data, look at goals, get feedback and prioritize your wish list. At the goal of the planning stage is to create a list of tasks that we feel will give you the biggest impact, and get you closer to your goal.
Develop
Doing the Work
This stage is fairly self-explanatory. It’s where work on the completing all the tasks that where decided on in the planning stage.
Learn
Examine, make conclusions and new hypothesis
Once the development is done and the changes are live (and enough time has passed for meaningful data to be collected) we take a look to see what impact those changes have had. Any guesses or questions we may have had in the planning stage will get validated and answered here. It’ll also help inform decisions in the next planning stage.
Transfer
In this stage we share any impactful findings we discovered in the learning stage with you and your team. This information can help improve and grow your business. Sometimes what we find out can have a big impact on your business – such as discovering new markets or shedding new insights into consumer behaviour.
Want to Learn More About Growth Driven Design?
Fill out the form below to download our FREE Introduction to Growth-Driven Design E-Book