Web design is changing at a rapid pace. The frequency of changes are also happening at an exponential rate. It's becoming overwhelming just to keep up with what is current and effective for internet marketing these days.
One area that really seems to be taking shape is the idea of Growth Driven Design. This is a movement that has been gaining ground with agencies we are part of a community with. The idea is pretty simple and follows the concept that the old way of web design is broken and we need to find a better way to develop to stay current.
The Old Way - Traditional Web Design
Back in the day, oh maybe 4-5 years ago, a website project would entails a team of developers, web designers, copywriters, graphic designers, branding experts, and maybe more. We'd spend hundreds of hours building a website that we "thought" would be an effective vehicle for internet marketing. We'd struggle, sweat, and toil. to get the site launched on time and on budget. The problem is that never happened.
The other issue is we wouldn't know how the website would perform with our design. We had very little data to go on and in effect would put the cart before the horse.
The New Way - Growth Driven Design
Now, the average lifespan of a website is 2 years for a redesign. Just this factor alone makes it impossible to use the old method. We ran into this problem years ago and had to come up with a better way to design and manage websites.
Lately we've had a couple of projects where we proposed growth driven design concepts to clients and during the website construction process we ran into a problem. We kept getting push back from them for design refinements. This goes against the entire process and forces us back to traditional design mode. This caused the projects to stall because we didn't propose that kind of project and there weren't enough hours to complete the project. I would say even if we had proposed a traditional web design project it would fail because it takes too long and the outcome isn't typically successful.
Other projects where we were able to create a launch pad website and publish more quickly have gone very well. The first reason may be the investment is smaller so there is less stress on the project. The second reason is we are making design changes while the site is live based on visitor behavior. So we are actually able to show reports of how our work is improving traffic.
Visuallizing your Engagement
There's an easy way we can do this. Using a simple tool for the Chrome browser with Google Analytics extension. If you have Analytics set up you will be able to have a visual of the percentage of clicks on buttons...etc.
Here's a screen shot of our home page using this tool. Look for the small orange squares with percentages which to tell us what percentage of clicks are reported from the traffic to the website:
As you can see in the orange colored blocks the percentage of clicks of each button or call to action. This give us great insight in how our users are behaving on the website.
The idea is we are looking to drive traffic to a landing page which has a form that someone fills out and becomes a lead. After that we can nurture those leads with email marketing and other things.
To learn more you can simply fill out our form for a free internet marketing analysis.
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