Are you aware about the fact that all the time and resources that you have invested on your website is in vain? Or maybe, you could leverage more from your existing website than what you are already getting.

What is normally accepted as a standard approach of web design is actually jumbled into a potential risk that is heavily affecting time, money, and opportunity of your business.

Is it possible to challenge the assumptions of the traditional web design process? The intention of this article is to provide a smart methodology to web design that is instrumental in keeping disasters at bay, and produce better results that grow your business.

Glitches In Traditional Web Design

Your website forms the centerpiece of all your marketing activities. All your business information, content and lead generation assets together form your marketing collateral that helps the visitors in their buyer’s journey.

If a prospect has already been through 70% of the sales process before reaching the sales team, it means they have consumed most of the required information via your website. Thus, it becomes inevitable for your business to provide an interface that exudes loads of value with an awesome user experience and drives your business growth.

Traditional Website Redesign Process Doesn’t Have An Impressive Reputation

Could you recount the last time your website underwent a redesign? For many it was the worst phase in their online marketing campaigns. When you consider a website redesign, there are numerous things you need to be compromise with. For starters here are the major negatives:

• Regular users of the website will face downtime.
• Loyal visitors may find a completely new interface and will take time to engage.
• The URL hierarchy changes and that affect your SEO power.
• It requires additional resources, time and money being the major ones.
• The traditional website design evaluation approach doesn’t tell us what works with the viewers and what won’t.
• Due to the heavy resources spent on the website, you will try to increase ROI even though it becomes difficult, and it may take upto 2-3 years to consider another website redesign.

The odds are that you will simply not enjoy your website redesign project.

How To Approach Website Redesign with a Different Perspective?

Troubled by dwindling conversion rates and ROI? Do you think that you need to optimize your website to achieve better conversion rates?

How does it sound when I tell you rather than completely revamping your website you could consider certain elements on your web pages and optimize them to increase engagement and conversions? A process that delivers a speedy and active website…

Welcome Growth-Driven Design

Growth-Driven Design completely redefines how you could optimize your website for better conversions. It doesn’t ask you to completely change your web design, launch, and simply wait for a couple of years. Instead, it involves a continuous cycle of design – research – improve. It dramatically diminishes the time and resources involved in website redesign and give you a scalable approach on the performance of different elements of your website and if your target audience engages with them.

Principles Of Growth-Driven Design

• Minimizes the risk of website redesigns.
• Continuously learn and improve based on research, test, and learn about the visitors’ behaviour.
• GDD learning informs marketing and sales who could make changes to their strategies and tactics.

Benefits of Growth-Driven Design

Some of the main benefits of have a growth-driven design approach are:

• Your website stays in continuous state of improvement, instead of 2-3 years.
• Your conversion rate growth at a constant pace as you will be enhancing your messages, calls-to-action, and forms on a regular basis.
• Real data will guide designers and marketers throughout the design methodology.
• You are ready to target your audience in 4-6 weeks instead of 4-6 months.
• Your customers will only find certain elements changed rather than seeing the whole website transformed.

How To Work With Growth-Driven Design (GDD)

Look upon GDD as having two-stages. One will strengthen the design process from the core by defining a strategy, while the other will consist of the continuous improvement phase.

Stage 1: Define a strategy

Goals

As with any other business activity, GDD should inevitably start with a clear definition of goals. Without goals there will be no accurate messages that you need to convey to your audience. At HubMonks, we are following a strict SMART goals model in all our HubSpot COS web development projects. These are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely. In case of a website redesign, the business could target a certain percentage of growth in their lead generation efforts within a time-frame. For this purpose the marketers will have to discuss the current benchmarks with designers and what they are aiming.

Buyer Personas

Building buyer personas will enable you to understand whom you’re trying to reach, what challenges they are facing, and what kind of a solution will fit their needs. A persona is a fictional character that represents your ideal audience. Knowing your personas will enable you to provide the best user experience to your customers at all the touch points across the buyer’s journey. Moreover, defining buyer personas will give you the exact idea about the kind of messages and their placement that will boost conversions.

Website Audit

A website and analytics audit will provide vital details about the channels that are the most effective for attracting visitors to your site, how users interact with the website with vital engagement metrics like time spent on a page, bounce rate and number of pages visited. Once you know the pain points of website users on the basis of the pages that are most often visited, you will optimize those pages for lead generation that resonates the voice of your audience in the best manner. A website audit will also give you fundamental assumptions like:

• Why users arrive on your website?
• What is the value proposition they are receiving?
• Should the design include more sections for a better understanding of the concept?
• Where should you place vital lead generation messages and elements?
• How are they accessing your website? (browsers, devices)

Website Inevitables

Finally, you are required to create a must-have list of the elements that will boost engagement and conversions. This will include new layout, new design, new sections, modified navigation features, new plugin integrations, functionality, or additional pages.

You might have created a long wish list. Now is the time to filter out those elements that will create the maximum impact. This will be based on the core objective of your website. Now comes the major part that you need to be prepared with:

• Produce the content and messages.
• Arrange your information architecture.
• Create a wireframe and design.
• You will decide the interactive elements that will go in the new design.

Stage 2: Continuous Improvement

The second stage will be mainly inclined towards continuous improvement and validation. It is a complete change from the traditional website redesign.

In the second stage, your main point of focus will be visitors to your website. You will have to decide how the site updates will affect user experience at various stages of the buyer’s journey. What will they think about them? Will the important elements draw their attention? There are basically four steps involved in this stage:

We will now discuss these steps in detail.

1. Plan

This plan will put into paper what is going to be achieved during a particular time-period.

There are several steps that go in this step:

• Performance vs. Goals will help in reviewing the current performance of your website.
• Additional data or research will help in determining if you need to add other action items in your wish list.
• Include marketing and the sales team. What have they understood about user behavior on the website since the last cycle? How could this learning impact your GDD program?

You may then use this data to shift the messaging on your site to better reflect end-user interest and can use it to brainstorm and update your wish list—you may want to bring your clients into this process as well so they’ll have a better understanding of the site’s impact when completed. Major revelations will be implemented in the following characteristics of the web page.

• Conversion optimization
• Enhance UX
• Personalize the experience for the user
• Build marketing assets

2. Develop

Once you have made a wish list of all major elements, start making impactful action on the site. The design team will now put their efforts to work on the elements highlighted by you in the planning stage. For every action item, you should have a metric that should be monitored when you experiment each item. In order to drive traffic to that website, develop additional marketing assets like social media posts and ads, emails, PPC ads, blogs, etc. All your marketing collateral should synchronize with your web page so that users get the same brand elements and message on landing up on your page.

3. Learn

This will be a continuous process as each time you reach this stage, you will have one common question, “What have we learnt about the user?” Your split tests and analytics tool will give you valuable data to help you decide whether your assumptions in the last phase were effective or not. All the subsequent changes on your website will be based on these learning. You will shift content on the website, move lead generation elements to new locations on the webpage, may be try to bring the form above the fold. You will also educate your team members about what has worked and what hasn’t.

You can also provide this information as a deliverable with your clients who could use it to facilitate data-based and data-driven decision-making amongst senior leaders at their organization.

In this step, you’ll review the data from experiments that have been conducted in step 2. This will help in validating your assumptions that had been made earlier. As a result, you will make necessary changes to your website content along with lead-driven elements.

4. Transfer

All the revelations from the campaign should be passed on to the marketing team and the design team. On reviewing previously completed actions, you will find several patterns about your users. For instance, you may have created two landing page variations. One variation could have an orange colored call-to-action, while the other might be saying a blue one.

After running the A/B test, you might have reviewed the data to find that more number of users are coming to the website via the orange colored button. Now that you have an element that triggers your audience better, you could inform other teams to start incorporating this element into other parts of marketing and sales activities.

Now conduct a meeting to educate these team members about your recommendations. Gather to brainstorm the ways to incorporate and transfer these ideas into tactical action items within the department.

Conclusion

This cycle is complete. However, one thing that you will continuously do after embracing growth-driven design is to repeat all the phases and their respective stages given above. The key to growth-driven design is to repeat over and over each time with better results and valuable revelations about the visitors. Your website will have more positive impact at the end of each cycle. Companies that have implemented growth-driven design are finding great success in flexibility and results.