July 12, 2024 by Michael Evans
The real estate market thrives on digital visibility. With agents, brokers, and developers competing for attention online, a standout website isn’t a luxury - it’s a necessity. However, the traditional approach to website design can feel like hitting a moving target. By the time you’ve perfected and launched your site, trends have changed, user preferences have shifted, and you’re left scrambling to catch up. This is where a growth-driven design methodology comes in. What if you could launch a website quickly and continue to optimize it based on real user data and user feedback? This approach not only reduces upfront costs and development time, it makes your website more agile, adaptable to changing market trends, and ultimately, more successful.
Growth-driven design isn’t about throwing together a bare-bones website and hoping for the best. It’s a strategic and data-driven process for building a high-performing online presence and evolving your web presence into a peak performing website. Imagine your real estate website as a dynamic entity, continuously improving to better serve your audience. Let’s explore why you should embrace growth-driven design for your website redesign.
Table of Contents:
- Growth Driven Design vs. Traditional Web Design
- What Are the Three Phases of Growth Driven Design?
- Conclusion
Growth Driven Design vs. Traditional Web Design
The differences between growth-driven design (GDD) and the traditional method can significantly impact your bottom line and ability to connect with potential leads meaningfully. It often comes down to resources vs. results. Real estate agents and property developers often have limited time, staff, and financial resources. GDD gives them a way to deploy a digital presence quickly and cost-effectively.
| Feature | Traditional Web Design | Growth Driven Design |
|---|---|---|
| Timeline | Months-long process with a large upfront investment | Fast launch (within weeks), gradual optimization, continuous improvement cycles |
| Cost | High initial investment, potential for budget overruns | Lower upfront cost, budget spread over time, easier to control spending |
| Flexibility | Difficult and expensive to make changes after launch | An iterative approach allows for continuous improvement and adaptation based on data |
| Data-driven Decisions | Reliance on assumptions and guesswork | Reliance on real-time user data, analytics, and A/B testing |
| Risk | Higher risk of launching a site that doesn’t meet user needs or business goals | Lower risk; mistakes can be corrected, and improvements can be made quickly |
What Are the Three Phases of Growth Driven Design?
Now that you have a sense of why growth-driven design makes more sense for a modern real estate business, let’s explore each stage.
1. Strategy
Similar to planning an open house or pitching a development proposal, a well-defined strategy forms the bedrock of successful growth-driven design. You should ask yourself: what goals are you trying to achieve through your website (lead generation, property showcasing, brand awareness)? Who is your ideal client (buyers, sellers, investors)? How do visitors use your site? Once you answer those questions, you’ll have a more productive conversation with the team designing your site.
A clearly defined strategy is critical to any website design process. This approach helps align everyone involved and ensures your web design aligns with the heart of your business strategy. The strategy stage of the growth-driven design process will lay out the entire project, creating a design model and performance roadmap.
2. Launch Pad
Just as a real estate developer breaks ground on a new project, you create a functional website with essential features prioritized over bells and whistles in this phase. Think of the Launch Pad as a functional and stylish model home for new development. The goal isn’t to present a half-finished product. It is, however, about getting your key message in front of the people who are ready to do business. Instead of waiting months for a “perfect” site (hint: there is no such thing), a growth-driven approach focuses on fast deployment, continual analysis, learning from actual user interaction, and iterative improvement. This lets you start collecting valuable data about user behavior from day one, fueling informed decisions.
A launch pad website is not your final product; it’s a starting point for gathering data about how users are interacting with your site. The launch pad site is built around your wishlist items, fundamental assumptions, and focus areas, and is a smarter approach to web design. This is where you start building your GDD website.
3. Continuous Improvement
Here’s where growth-driven design diverges sharply from the traditional website launch and leaves it in the dust. Growth-driven design is about continually testing, measuring, and learning. Continuous improvement is a core tenet based on analyzing user data, running A/B testing, and constantly improving each aspect of the website experience. Whether it’s tightening up website copy, refreshing a design element that’s not working, or responding to user feedback through tools like Lucky Orange, the agile approach of GDD keeps things moving. Rather than resting on their laurels after launch, real estate businesses embracing GDD treat their websites like dynamic properties. Just as a home may need updates over time to command top dollar in the market, your website should constantly evolve to better engage visitors.
Your launch pad website is live and collecting user data. This data will help form your strategy moving forward into the continuous improvement stage. The continuous improvement stage is about collecting user feedback, looking at what’s working and what's not working, and making data-driven decisions.
Conclusion
With its user-centric focus and emphasis on continuous improvement, growth-driven design completely changes how real estate agents and property developers approach their online presence. By prioritizing user feedback, testing, measuring, and adapting, real estate businesses gain a critical edge in the digital age. This design methodology helps create a measurable business by having a clear understanding of your ideal path, a website-specific strategy to achieve your improvement goal, focusing on the highest impact tasks, and allowing your website to evolve with your customers. Using a growth-driven design strategy launch pad continuous improvement cycle will result in a successful website that converts.