Most engagements with a web development company are structured in one of two ways; one-off products such as site launches and platform migrations, or as development retailers to apply patches, fix things that are broken, and to provide reactive assistance on development tasks. But there is a better way...The approach to website design has shifted drastically over the past few years with an increased focus on Growth-Driven Design over traditional web design. If you're unfamiliar with growth driven design (GDD) the concept is pretty simple. Instead of doing one big design project that takes months to execute and then sits dormant until the next redesign, GDD makes little changes in an ongoing manner that allows you to be consistently testing, changing and optimizing.
Image credit: Hubspot, Rethinking Web Design
Growth-driven development (GDDev) follows a similar approach to growth driven design. Instead of just implemented reactive fixes to issues or doing one-off projects, growth driven development incorporates optimization into your day-to-day and long-term strategy. Proactively tackling common issues such as page speed, the check-out process, integrating new tools and technologies and everything else that your sales, marketing, business development team and customers bring to the table.
This part is essential, and it's the part that generally gets missed with development. All too often development changes are made on a whim and a fancy, or even just because of necessity, and there is no evaluation of the impact that those changes had on your website. Following the GDD methodology, GGDev focuses on incremental changes and tracks those changes so that you can know what is working to improve your site and what might actually be holding you back.
As an ecommerce site, your marketing team is likely focused on KPIs including your conversion rates, page speed, conversion funnels, and cost per acquisition. They likely also have a long list of action items they'd like to implement on the site, but aren't able to because the development team is either outsourced and the costs too much to justify, or they're in-house and don't have the capacity or ability to execute the array of requests brought forth.
Working with a GDDev team that has capacity, ability and experience to execute your changes will allow you to finally implement the little things that will set your site apart from the rest.