Prototype Your Web Design And You Will Save Money

Want to know where you’re  wasting the most money, and, more importantly, what you can do about it?

No significant product, whether it’s a car, a perfume, or a child’s toy, makes it to market without first being prototyped and tested.

The reason we do this is to figure out whether something is going to work functionally and commercially before investing a lot of money finalising its development and launching it.

Yet most web sites are still launched without any form of prototype.

Most websites go live with a complete, polished design, based on a combination of the designer’s and the client’s personal taste – and their ‘best guess’ of what will work.

This is the way it’s always been done, and it’s extremely wasteful.

We need a new approach to web design, where we actually test whether a site or page will work before spending thousands on fancy design.

Here’s the general approach:

• Guess what the market wants. This involves thinking about problems or opportunities your website can solve, and crafting appropriate propositions.
• Create a ‘lo-fi’ website or landing pages. Invest in content, not design. Use a conventional design theme that follows standard practice.
• Drive traffic to these prototype pages using AdWords.
• Test the various appeals, from AdWords and Analytics data.
• What appeals make more people click?
• What pages do they stay to read?
• What content persuades them to click through?
• Keep going.
  Retire appeals that don’t work. Try to come up with better messages, and test using the lo-fi approach.
• When you are confident you have a good appeal, start to refine your messaging and calls to action using split-testing.
• Finally, apply graphic design in multiple rounds, but split-test each change to make sure your design actually improves conversion.

Using this approach, you’ll spend more time crafting content and less time crafting graphics, until you know your ‘prototype’ content works.

You’ll invest in buying traffic, which gives you vital market research intelligence based on the way people actually behave. This could be the best money you ever spend on your website.

Because you’re working with quick prototype pages, you can test different words and pictures easily, without having to spend time unpicking complex page designs.

You can be confident that if a page works with a rough design, it won’t perform any worse as you refine the design. You only need to keep design changes that work.

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