Using Growth-Driven Design (Part 1)

If you’re starting a business, having a website is about as mandatory as obtaining licenses and buying inventory. Designing a website, though, is more complex than ever in the more competitive times we live in. Creating a site for business needs more careful thought than cutting corners and putting together something cheaply.

Creating A Strategy And Website Goals Are Key to Growth-Driven Design

Growth-driven design is the way to achieve more success and bring more conversions. It’s starting to replace traditional web design for a good reason.

Using growth-driven design helps you grow the site over time. In our first blog on this design process, we’ll look at how to set up a smart design strategy.

What Kind of Strategy Do You Need?

The only similarity to traditional and growth-driven design is in finding a strategy to bring a foundation to the site’s aesthetic. What differs between these two design methods is it won’t necessarily be the final word using a growth-driven design philosophy.

In traditional web design, many designers simply do a one-time site creation and then leave you to deal with future changes or updates.

You can avoid that with growth-driven strategy because you’re going to evolve the site over a long period of time.

Nevertheless, what kind of strategy do you need to keep your website evolving? Basically, strategy is one half of a two-phase system to start your website design with a real vision. Many of the things you’ll place in your strategy you’ll turn to later when making possible last-second changes.

Scoping Out Your Goals

Maybe this isn’t the first website you’ve had. If not, you’ll want to include what your goals are in improving what you had before. For a first-time site, find out what you want to achieve once your website goes live.

Do you want it as a hub for communication, marketing, or just to prove industry expertise? Depending on what industry you’re in, each goal is going to become different.

One thing to remember is you should look at goals for each department in your company. Goals for your marketing and sales departments are probably different from each other, even though they share the same company objective.

After finding all department goals, you’ll want to see how your website is going to help achieve cumulative goal success.

Creating Personas for Your Most Likely Visitors

The next step is to create personas for the visitors you’re planning to target. Much like what your marketers do in creating customer personas, growth-driven design strategy has to create similar personas to understand what content they want to see.

Your marketing team should work with you on this since personas are connected. Marketing content is likely going to go on your website, so knowing how visitors respond to content shapes what comes later.

In fact, creating personas is one of the most important aspects to growth-driven design because it looks deep into the mind of your demographic and what their real pain points are. This also includes their increasingly complex buying decisions.

Since this form of design centers around the user, personas are essentially your backbone.

Creating a Wishlist for the Future

The things you’d like to include in your website perhaps can’t happen at the moment due to budget or other uncertainties. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t create a wishlist for what you’d like to have, because growth-driven design means evolving your site based on visitor response.

First, you should come up with the most essential things you’ll need to launch your website successfully. Even if you start with basics (and a few extras), you can get visitations going to measure response.

Creating an agile and flexible list for later helps you implement certain features without delay based on what visitation analytics tell you.

Join us for Part 2 on our growth-driven design series to understand what happens during the site creation process and beyond.

Contact us at ThinkFlame to learn more about our full-service marketing expertise.