Growth Driven Website Design

A more effective way to do website design & development

The traditional website design & development process is totally broken. Most website design & development projects run over time and over budget, consume significant company resources and don’t produce the anticipated return on investment

Risks of traditional website design & development

The up-front cost is high

The cost of an average small to medium business website ranges between $15,000 and $100,000 which is a substantial up-front cost for most businesses. Not only is this a large outgoing, it is spent on a “best guess” of what your customers need from your website until the next redesign - say in 2 or 3 years.

Long time before anything is commissioned and a huge company resource commitment

As the entire website is rebuilt before commissioning anything, it takes many months and considerable time and energy from your team right through the process, leaving you and your team positively drained by the time the site is turned on.

Over budget, over time and inflexible

Even with very careful planning and a well specified scope of work, most projects go over time and over budget and if you find you need to make changing the original specifications part way through only makes this worse.

Design decisions are made and expected to drive results for 2 to 3 years

The decisions made about what is needed to satisfy your website visitors and turn them into leads and customers which are expected to produce results, with no major updates, right up until the website is redeveloped in 2 or 3 years.

Growth driven website design & development - the process

Phase 1: Commission the launch pad website

The launch pad website is a cutdown version of what could be considered the complete website and can run stand alone or alongside the remainder of your existing website. The launch pad website includes the content and elements of your website which drive most of the results. The things you’d like to have on your website, for the sake of completeness, take most of the time to design and develop. It’s best to leave these things for later, commissioning only the parts that have the greatest impact first.

Phase 1 includes a strategy stage much like traditional website development. After this the process differs; instead of scheduling all the tasks which came out of the strategy stage a wish list is produced of everything needed to “complete” the website. These are then prioritised and a subset selected for the launch pad website. Generally only around 20% of the items in the wish list need to go into the launch pad website.

Then we build the launch pad website and with only 20% of the overall wish list going into this site it’s easy to understand why it gets completed and commissioned quickly at a fraction of the cost of the “complete” website.

Phase 2: The growth driven design cycle

Now your launch pad website is up and running, delivering results for your business and collecting actionable data on which parts of the site are delivering for your business and which parts aren’t you can begin a data driven process of building the rest of the site and tweaking what has been built.

Each month a number of items from the wish list are added to the website with the aim of continuing improvement.

Phase 3: Continue to repeat phase 2

Growth driven website design derives it success from getting the website up quickly and continually improving the site rather than a complete rebuild every 2 or 3 years.

How does this process mitigate the risks of traditional website design

Lower Up-front cost

Given that only a portion of the “complete website” is commissioned initially, the launch pad website, the up-front costs are reduced significantly.

Shorter Time to launch and not a drain on company resources

It takes considerably less time to develop the launch pad website and much less time is required from your team. From here company resources are only required in small manageable monthly chunks as the website is refined.

On budget, on time and flexible

The launch pad website is more manageable and not difficult to change once started and easy to be on time and on budget. In fact, the whole process is about continual change.

Website continually improved

The whole process ensures the website gets better and better, not just a huge step improvement at rebuild time.