Blog Insights

On today’s web, is a website ever a once-and-done event?  

No.

In traditional web design, you start with a website (see chart below) based on the assumption that “it will work” to achieve whatever smart goals you've set. After a year and a half to two years, you see that performance is dwindling and you embark on a 3-month redesign. You gain impact and the site works for another one and a half to two years before performance falls flat again, and you have to repeat the process.

The chart below shows that gains occur abruptly and fall flat quickly.

Website design is a daunting task for many business professionals – it requires a lot of time and thought they don’t typically include in their day.

People say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I can think of no place that is more applicable than in the world of creative web design. A simple tour of internet sites yields thousands of websites with different colors, shapes, styles, and features. Many of these websites are unique, many of them look the same, but at a glance, it’s easy to see that not all sites are created equal.

The web development world has been buzzing about GDD, or Growth-Driven Design, which is a methodology that embraces small, methodical, and frequent design changes to a website as compared to a total, one-time, comprehensive redesign. The explosion of GDD has enlightened marketing professionals on flaws regarding traditional marketing tactics, inviting our mindset to evolve and forcing Type-A marketers, like myself, to take a step back, and embrace the process.

Anyone who has ever done a website design or re-design knows how difficult the process and management of the project can be. From beginning to end, a web design project requires the focus, cooperation, and feedback of many moving people – people who don’t necessarily have the time to complete the project, no matter how much they want to. Often, you fall into intention limbo, where you want to get things done quickly but the project seems to move at an alarmingly slow pace. The result is a hallowed design that carries with it a hope of success left to chance.