Over time, every business grows, evolves and adapts to market challenges, new opportunities and customer trends.
For that reason, their website (and marketing strategies) should evolve too. That's why we love the MVP website approach...
First of all, what is an MVP?
A Minimum Viable Product is the most efficient solution to a problem given time and/or budget constraints. It is a version of a product that is developed quickly with the intention of gaining insights into exactly what people are looking for.
An MVP approach is our recommended pathway for some of our customers, especially if they’re in the early stages of brand, business, product or software development. It’s a great website solution that allows for easy upgrades as the organisation grows and evolves.
What are the benefits of an MVP website?
- MVP production has a more rapid build time
- Getting something live increases the likelihood of early adopters
- It grows your amount of validated learning about customers and means you can optimise your website based on feedback
- You can fine tune the website as your offering grows - it’s doubtful that the first thing you launch will be your one and only offering; it takes years to refine a final product or service
- A few pages requires a lesser amount of effort to overhaul if it turns out that the MVP isn’t quite what people expected or you bring out a different version of a new product
- Basic functionality provides the perfect foundation for evolution
- Initial development costs are kept down making it a lean startup approach
- Live data is gathered much sooner, guiding the next design phase
- It allows you to collect the maximum amount of validated insights in the quickest time possible
- Information is streamlined as you are forced to condense long-form content to fit one webpage
Our MVP website
We don’t just recommend an MVP website to our clients. It’s exactly what we did for ourselves way back in December 2019...
Christmas. A time for rest, relaxation and switching off. Or for many business owners, it's the time for re-igniting the flame. For coming up with new ideas. And for jumping into the new year with fire in your belly (and too many mince pies).
Over the festive season of 2019, we set aside a few days to work on Beyond's website strategy. By this point, Beyond had been successfully running since March of that year, without a website (the irony!) so we knew it was time we got that fixed.
We knew exactly what we wanted to achieve but it wasn’t possible in those5 hazy days between Christmas and new year when everyone forgets what day of the week it is! The strategy, user experience, content writing, design, animation, photography, videography and development would take months, as does any sizeable website project, and we just didn’t have this, especially with new client projects starting back up in the new year.
For these reasons, we opted for an MVP approach, launching a simple landing page for the turn of the new year.
It was nothing revolutionary, just one-pager, but it put a face to our name. It meant 'Googlers' had a place to land from our business page and followers could click through from social media to an area with more information.
Thanks to our MVP website, we saw interest in Beyond steadily rise.
The evolution of our MVP website
Our one-pager served us well for a couple of months, but in March 2020 something big happened. It was mega. And no, it wasn’t the national lockdown...
It was the launch of beyond.agency 2.0! Ok, it wasn’t quite on the same scale as the global pandemic, but it was mega for us.
On Friday 20th March, lockdown hit. We knew it was sink or swim for small businesses, so the following weekend we used the 3 days we should have been spending in Copenhagen, hardly slept, and launched an upgraded version of our MVP website on Monday 30th March.
It wasn’t an overly large site, in fact we only added one new static page and 5 dynamic portfolio pages, but it meant we had a place to showcase our expertise and a variety of our awesome previous work, even if I do say so myself!
Throughout 2020, we worked tirelessly on multiple major projects that reflect our ambition. And because of that, our own website and marketing took a back-seat as we've focused our hearts and souls on the goals of our clients.
It wasn't until Christmas 2020 (what a surprise) then we revisited our site again. This time with a few more days under our belt since no-one did anything under Boris' eye 😅
MVP website round 3
The beauty of creating an MVP website is that it’s totally transformable - beyond.agency 2.0 came just 3 months after first launching, and after a whirlwind 9 months, we’ve had some time to refocus on our website and level-up for a third time (what a surprise that it's during the 'downtime' of Christmas, again!)
Third time round, we stepped things up a gear:
- We rebranded! We’ve changed our typeface, enhanced our colour palette and upgraded our logo
- We added video content and in-action images- we had a professional photoshoot to ensure our photos were in keeping with our brand
- We created this exciting new blog area
- We added some not-so-exciting legal pages... Well, that’s not strictly true - the cookies page is actually one of my favourites!
- We developed individual service pages to explain exactly what we can do for our visitors who are looking for a new website or marketing support
- We've built landing pages in preparation for PPC campaigns
All hail the MVP website!
Build, measure, learn.
Taking a minimum viable product approach meant that our website could, and still can, evolve as Beyond grows.
It has given us the flexibility to update content, add new services and alter the way we work without having to undo months of time that was put into an all-singing, all-dancing V1 website.
What's more, our MVP approach has allowed us to A/B test, gather feedback and tweak our site to optimise user experience.
So, just 12 months after launching Beyond's MVP landing page, we reached beyond.agency 3.0 - this is the perfect example of why taking an MVP approach to your website can be the perfect solution.
Just a heads up, some of the links in this article may be affiliate links, meaning we may make a small commission on any sign-ups or purchases for the tools we recommend.
