A Launchpad Website is the first phase launch of a core website. A core website consists of 20% your company’s website pages that produce 80% of the website’s results. The Launchpad website is produced using the data that emerges from a stringent and strategic 7-step research and analysis process. It is the first phase of a conversion-driven (growth-driven) design process.

In traditional website design, your website design team designs a scope of work based on the desires and needs of the client. If you are working with a company that has a strong background in inbound marketing and conversion-driven (or growth-driven – GDD) website design and campaign strategy, your website design process will start with a significant amount of very important research.

A website design company “fluent” and successful in inbound marketing and campaign strategy will likely use a process similar to ours before they ever start designing or developing your website.

Why does it matter?

Because without implementing a strategic research-intensive process to analyze, understand and develop your company’s critical and foundational user and competitor data, your website will not perform – it won’t have a fully user-driven design, and it will not attract and convert the highest potential of quality leads.

At a minimum, the following research should be performed prior beginning the design or development process.

1. Business strategy, goals and objectives
2. User experience
3. User analysis
4. Core contributors to success report
5. Buyer Persona research and development
6. Buyer’s Journey Map
7. Comprehensive website and content marketing strategy

With this process completed, your website design company will have identified the most important pages on your website.

Rather than wait months for the full website design, development and testing to be completed, a high-performance, lead-converting Launchpad (or core) website can be developed more quickly. This will allow you to begin getting the results you need, much more quickly.

Once the Launchpad website is live, it:

• Begins to attract and convert targeted leads
• Improving search engine results
• Provides invaluable user experience information and insight that allows us to create and improve a website design that is user-driven
• Produces important data that will support real-time refinements for better and better results
• Yields data and knowledge that is applied to the development of the next phases of your website design and development so that it yields optimum performance out of the gate

How to Identify the Contents of a Launchpad Website

It all starts with the analysis we’ve described above. The next step is to create a prioritized wish list. Your company’s wish list is driven by your organization’s strategy and goals, as they apply to marketing and sales.

Wish List Analysis

• Identify and separate the items or goals that are “must haves” from the “nice-to-haves” items. Must-haves are the high-performing, company strategy aligned, goals and objectives. They deliver significant quantifiable impact against the corporate goals.
• Analyze the wish list, identifying the top 20% of the goals and objectives that have the ability to deliver more than 80% of the website’s overall impact.
• Re-evaluate the list for any elusive “nice-to-haves” and move them back to the “future phase” list.
• Analyze and prioritize your wish list again to confirm that everything you have listed should be included in the Launchpad site. If it is not an item that returns 80% of your website’s impact, move it to the “Phase Two” list.

Launchpad Option Number Two

When a client has a large, comprehensive website or perhaps they have a newly designed, low-performance website, we’ll often recommend a second Launchpad website option.

This option involves all of the research and the wish list steps. However, rather than remove the existing site and launch a totally newly designed Launchpad site, we apply what we’ve learned to the existing site.

We create an action plan with prioritized target dates that drive the process to “refresh” the core pages of the existing site. The core pages are the 20% that produce 80% of the desired results. We apply what we learned in the 7-step research and analysis phase to the pages we have identified as the core pages.

Like the first option, the goal is to get high-performing pages in place so you begin getting qualified leads and new customer conversions.

Google Web Master Best Practices Always Apply

Google Web Master provides website design and website development companies with Google’s best practice rules. Not following them can result in your site:

• Failing to rank well or losing its rankings
• Getting penalized
• Flat out getting your site shut down

Not one of these consequences is desirable. In fact, they are downright expensive… really expensive when you consider the loss of opportunity for your company.

Whether you choose the traditional path or the conversion-driven design (aka growth driven – GDD) process – and whether you decide to hire a guy who proudly works from home in his underwear or a bonafide, qualified website design company with a track record of achieving impressive ROI and success on behalf of their client, your website must adhere to Google’s best practices.

Google’s Top Four Current Ranking Factors for 2017

It’s also important to understand Google’s current ranking factors. The most important ranking factors at the time of this writing are:

• High-quality, highly-relevant, optimized content using highly-relevant keywords, long-tail keyword phrases and latent semantic indexing keywords in the content.
• Backlinks – this link dives into the importance of quality backlinks as well as several other very important website design best practices
• Mobile-first User Experience – Google is primarily crawling the mobile version of a site’s content to learn how it should be indexed in search. For more information check out this article by Search Engine Journal.
• On-page Technical SEO Factors – On-page SEO is all about user experience. The better your on-page SEO, the better your rankings will likely be. We’ve written an exhaustive article “On-page SEO Checklist 2017 – 21 Tips You Need to Know.”

Is your website outperforming your best sales person?

Is your competition getting more quality leads and customer conversions than you are?

We’ll provide you with a complimentary Online Performance Analysis to help you identify the answers to these questions. If you are ready to learn more, use the form at the bottom of the page to schedule a live consultation.

No obligation. No pressure to buy. I promise.

The only thing you have to lose is not getting the information you need to increase your website performance and new client revenue!

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Using data-driven analyses and research, we will conduct a thorough performance audit of your:

• Website Performance
• Brand Performance
• Inbound Marketing Strategy
• Search Engine Optimization
• Competition
• Social Signals
• Domain Ranking and Rating

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