Digital Marketing Blog | Struto

What is a Growth-Driven Design Launch Pad Website?

Written by Brad Harris | 09 May 2016

Growth-Driven Design is fast becoming the preferred method of building websites, and this new way of building is itself built on the idea of a launch pad website.

In traditional web design, you begin by researching and analysing your data. From your research, you draw fundamental assumptions based on how people interact with your website. This leads you to create a hypothesis for your new website design to be built on.

For GDD, you go through the same initial processes to come up hypotheses on what your users want, but instead of taking a leap of faith by implementing them all at once, you take a data-driven approach. By prioritising website features on a 80/20 wish-list, you can launch your website quickly with the most essential features in place. Not only does this minimise the time to launch but it enables you to use data to drive how your website evolves in real-time.   

What is a Launch Pad website?

Creating a launch pad website is the starting point of your GDD build, on which you begin to improve and develop using the highest priority items from your wish-list.

The launch pad website is made up of the most basic functions that simply enable your users to become interested in your product/service and seek more information.

In the next phase of the GDD process, you look at your wish-list and begin to understand what 20% of these wish-list items will give you 80% of what your users’ want and need.

The Wish-list

Your wish-list is the full description of all the items and functions that you imagine wanting and needing on your website at the time of launch (which, in the old way of doing things, forms the initial big build of your traditional website).

These items and functions evolve over time, just like your GDD website. In fact, a true growth-driven design process should never be short of a wish-list. That’s because your wish-list is first compiled from your initial hypothesis of what your users want from your website. But, as time goes on and you test how users respond to your building launch pad website, your wish-list will change, grow and respond to the data that you’re collecting.

For the means of this blog post, though, a launch pad website is always built off of only the vital bones of your initial wish-list. 

Website Implementation

In phase 2, after the development of your initial wish-list, launch pad website and analysis, you will begin adding some of the items from your wish-list onto your site.

This is usually done according to the 80/20 rule – where you select 20% of the items that will give you 80% of the results. Simply put, you prioritise your wish-list items and begin implementing the most necessary and promising few, before moving on. 

Once these items have been chosen, the process is the same as any website implementation:

  • Messaging & Content
  • User Experience (UX) & Site Architecture
  • Inbound Marketing Strategy Alignment
  • Wireframes
  • Designs
  • Development
  • Quality Assurance and Testing

Once these have been installed and tested, it’s time for data analysis of your users’ interaction and their lead development, which in turn furthers the GDD process by repeating the wish-list and implementation steps.

Where traditional design needs inconsistent and massive intakes of time, effort and money, GDD works continuously to remove this inefficiency.

I hope I’ve helped you understand a bit more about GDD and the future it has in your marketing. If you’d like to know more, simply get hold of us by using the live chat in the bottom right corner of your screen.