Minneapolis Web Design: Growth-Driven Design vs. Traditional Design

In the first part of our Minneapolis Web Design series, we discuss the differences between Growth-Driven Design (GDD) and Traditional Web Design and why GDD is the future of the Minneapolis web design space. As always, please feel free to join the conversation by commenting on this blog post below. Also, don't forget to subscribe to our blog at the bottom of this page!

traditional web design

Chances are, you didn't enjoy your last website redesign. The traditional web design approach usually includes:

1. Large up-front costs: The average small to medium sized business (SMB) website costs anywhere between $15,000-$100,000 up-front and the website requires the full payment before going live.
2. Large time and resource commitment: The average SMB website takes 3 months to complete and requires a great deal of resources and energy from your team.
3.  Over budget, out of original scope: Large projects can fluctuate in cost and time, which makes accurate quotes nearly impossible. Project delays and increases in fees are not uncommon in this approach.
4. No prototype with proven success: The traditional method launches a website that should succeed in theory. However, this method lacks a trial and error run with visitors. The trial and error approach allows you to determine what works for your visitors and what doesn't which is essential in the design process.
5. After initial website launch, often the website sits unchanged with no major updates for 1.5 to 2 years: Your website is or should be the focal point of all of your marketing efforts and should be your best sales tool yet, the traditional approach to website design has fundamental flaws and can cause wasted opportunity because it remains unchanged/updated for long periods of time.

Some updates/improvements may happen along the way with adding a post to your blog once in a while or possibly a landing page or two but the majority of your website will remain unchanged.

What is growth-Driven design?

GDD is a proactive approach to web design that is focused on a continual process of converting visitors to leads, and leads to customers. GDD focuses on 3 main principles:

1. Minimize the risk of website redesigns
2. Continuously learn & improve
3. As you learn inform marketing & sales (and vice versa)

GDD websites minimize the risk of website redesign by taking a systematic approach to shorten the time to launch, focusing on real impact and continuous learning and improvement. By focusing on continuously learning about your visitors and improving your website, through continuous improvement we can reach peak performance.

Best of all, GDD informs your marketing and sales teams. GDD is tightly integrated with marketing & sales. What we learn about our visitors will help us inform and improve our marketing and sales strategies and efforts.

growth-driven design vs. traditional web design

Your website is your biggest marketing asset and it should be the centerpiece of all your marketing efforts. The first place people go is your website when looking for more information on your products/services. On top of that, your best salesperson should be your website. Unfortunately, the traditional approach to web design is fundamentally broken.

How can we approach the website redesign process from a different angle? We need to find a process that produces a quick and nimble website that produces viewer feedback.

Today, visitors and buyers hold all of the power and your website needs to cater to their expectations. Your customers are constantly evolving and their tendencies and habits may deviate due to your industry evolving as well. Shouldn't your website continue to evolve with them? Enter Growth-Driven Design. Constantly monitoring and accommodating these changes within your entire online presence is essential to driving business growth with your website. This is a pillar of GDD and is usually lost or ignored in the traditional approach to web design. Check out some of the other differences between GDD and traditional web design in the chart below:

GDD is also a great tool to help you evaluate the ROI of your marketing efforts. Evaluating ROI is key to improving and cultivating your website strategy and also informs you on what type of return you are getting from your overall marketing efforts. Because you know what is going in and what is being improved on your website on a monthly basis, it is easy to track and attribute changes in results to your GDD efforts thus giving you an idea of what your month to month ROI.

conclusion

GDD is an exciting and powerful new web design methodology. Of course, there are detractors of GDD and still quite a bit of support for the traditional website methodology. The traditional methodology is still a viable option for companies that are looking to make significant changes to their entire website in one strategic pass BUT... If you are looking to maximize your website's potential and turn your website into a lead generating machine, GDD is the best option for your company.

THANKS FOR READING!

Thank you for taking the time to read the first part of our Minneapolis Web Design series! If you're interested in learning more, download the free ebook 'An Introduction to Growth-Driven Design' by clicking below. Also, if you'd like to learn more about the process of creating a Growth-Driven website - check out this article from our blog!