It’s been the way we’ve done web design for years.
The traditional website design process is rife with problems – significant ones.
But design companies everywhere are trying to convince you to stay with this process, because, well, for no good reason other than they want to make money and stay in business!
But you should pause before entering into a contract to redo your website using traditional design.
We’ll show you why and what to do instead.
The Problem With Website Design
Traditional web design (or think Steve Jobs and Apple before the Mac) is a slow, unengaging, costly process.
Website projects typically go out of scope, over budget and over deadline. Frequently.
Its inherent risks, not surprisingly, cause many businesses to avoid moving forward with a website redesign because:
- It’s expensive. Before you ever see a web page or get a single lead from the website, you have to invest a ton of money upfront into the design. By some estimations, a small or medium-sized business can spend from $15,000 to $80,000 on the design. Further, you have to fork over this investment before you even know if it will positively impact your business and generate income. Yikes!
- It consumes time and resources. Typically, your website design project will take at least three to four months – and often, much longer. During this time, you have to devote a ton of resources (your team) and time to the project. Since you don’t even know if it will drive leads and sales, that’s a risky proposition.
- It laughs in the face of deadlines and budgets. The scope of a website design project is so large and there are multiple moving parts that it’s nearly impossible to accurately predict a completion date – or even the cost, as a result. The delays and budget overages stall your website’s progress, makes you look bad and seriously affects revenue potential.
- It’s subjective. You need to be able to measure the results of the redesign project, and you’ll be held accountable for it. But there’s no way to really know if the decisions you make NOW about its design will really work. Isn’t that simply ludicrous? You’d never release a product or service if you didn’t know there was a market demand for it, right? Most traditional website design is based on hypothesis, an educated guess, that can never be validated.
- It’s not up-to-date. Once a traditional website design is launched, it remains stagnant for years – as many as it takes for you to be brave enough to take on another website redesign project. What should be your best sales and marketing asset essentially becomes a wasteland of irrelevant, outdated information.
There’s a better approach to web design. It’s called growth-driven design.
The Optimal Way to Design Your Website – if You Want to Save Time, Money and Resources
Here’s an overview of how the growth-driven design process works and its benefits:
- Lowers risk. It minimizes traditional web design risks by shortening the time-to-launch and focusing on what will impact revenue quickly, and then continuously expand on and improve the site AFTER it's launched.
- Bases decisions on cold, hard facts. Improvements made to the site are based on hard data. By researching, testing and learning about user behavior, you can make ongoing improvements to the website that drive peak performance.
- The process helps marketing and sales come together. Gasp. Yes, that IS possible and GDD is the avenue to make it happen. Because the growth-driven design process is so integrated with sales and marketing, you will be able to use the website data that you glean about visitors to inform your sales and marketing strategies, and then vice versa: Your marketing and sales will inform design.
Final Thoughts
What do you think is the better way to design your website?
The old, stodgy way that doesn’t guarantee results, is sure to go over budget, and take way longer than you’d imagined?
Or the process that builds your website one strategic piece at a time, with a defined budget and deadline, and is informed by data – not assumptions.
In what areas of web design do you struggle?
