There’s been a massive shift in the way that people at the top of businesses look at their websites. Instead of a ‘set it and forget it’ mentality, they constantly seek to improve their website to increase results.

Most marketers agree that their website is a critical part of their business. However, only 42% make improvements to their website more than once a year.

Too often we try and do everything at once when it comes to improving our business’ website – think projects titled ‘website refresh’ or ‘new website’ – with the launch of the website marking the end of the process. Top-performing websites flip this model on their head, treating the launch of their site the start of the process.

Why do you think websites like Amazon look completely different from five years ago, or even one year ago, but you’ve never noticed a ‘full-scale update of their site’? It’s because they often make small tactical changes to improve the user journey, making the website a more effective tool in achieving business goals, such as revenue.

The traditional website model is broken

Traditional website designs produce poor results. That’s not because they don’t have great people working on the project; it’s because the project stops once the website is launched. The business then holds marketing and sales teams accountable for the success of the website, with very few changes being made, data being reviewed, or user experience testing carried out.

So what’s the answer?

Growth-Driven Design (GDD) is a website project framework that focuses on creating a website which thrives on user data, allows for continuous improvements, and puts an emphasis on achieving your business goals.

The GDD process

GDD is a website project that’s split into three main sections: Strategy, LaunchPad, and Key Improvements.

Strategy

This project framework only works if you have goals in place. These goals need to be specific and measurable and – most importantly – have a direct impact on the success of the business.

Example goals could include:

• Generate 100 qualified leads per month
• Generate £100k worth of sales per month

These goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound (SMART goals).

Examples of what your goals shouldn’t be:

• I want the website to be better than our competitors’
• I want people to know what we do as soon as they land on our homepage

While both of these sound great, they’re not very measurable, don’t directly improve businesses success, and are often opinionated.

Once you have your goals in place and have spent time fully understanding your customers through the creation of persona templates, you can reverse engineer these goals to create the stretch targets needed to form the actions your team needs to carry out for the launchpad.

LaunchPad

This is a website that looks and performs better than the one you have today but isn’t the finished product. The whole point of GDD is that you’ll never have a finished project, but a constant project of improving what you currently have to make it better and allowing you to achieve better results over time.

A HubSpot study has shown that launchpads are often launched in 60 days, on time, and improve with real data. Whereas a traditional website takes 108 days to launch, is on average two weeks late, and is forgotten about once it’s launched.

How beneficial would it be to have a new website in two months’ time? Want one? Drop us a line today.

Key improvements

Once your launchpad is live, you can now start to analyse real user data to make continuous improvements and achieve better results.

It’s at this point that your team and team can collaborate to really start pushing the boundaries in terms of what’s possible with your website through a range of A/B tests.

Benefits of GDD

To weigh up the benefits of GDD vs the traditional model, our award-winning web team have put together a few of their thoughts below:

• You can spread your website budget over time
• Launch an improved website more quickly
• Data-driven decision making for better results
• Continuous improvements allow you to be agile to changing customer demands
• Enjoyable for everyone involved as the priority is on achieving shared goals
• More leads and revenue due to faster launchpad delivery

Overview

Top-performing websites don’t stop evolving over time, instead, they’re created and optimised with the sole intention of generating favourable results for your business.

This is done through a process called growth-driven design, also known as GDD. This puts a larger emphasis on strategy and goal setting, allows an improved website to be launched in a six-week window, and continuously has the attention of specialists to improve the results the website generates for your business.

“GDD puts your customers and their journey at the heart of the process, focusing on what they need and not what you think they need. It does this by taking a data-driven approach aligned with your business goals, and getting a site in front of your customers quickly so you can hear what they have to say.”

– Jon Martin, Technical Director at Hallam

We’re a full-service digital agency, with a team of certified GDD specialists. To set up a call with one of our specialists today to learn more about websites which drive results, click here.