How to Build a Professional Website: Part 3 – Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
There are many factors to consider when building a website for your business. We’ve already discussed the top three most important elements of any website and how and why you should be creating mockups. Today, we’ll be looking at another website-building essential: minimum viable product sometimes referred to as MVP.
If you’ve followed the steps outlined in our previous two posts, you should also have a solid understanding of what your website’s look and feel will be. As important as it is to have a clear vision for your site, if you only think about that vision, you may end up biting off more than you can chew.
By building in strategic stages, however, you can begin to earn money from your website before it has even been completed to your final standards. Not only does this bring capital into your business earlier, but it can also make achieving your dream website more attainable.
What is a Minimum Viable Product?
The first step in determining the stages for your web build is identifying your business’ minimum viable product (MVP). What is minimum viable product? MVP is a concept referring to the minimum amount that you need to offer to turn leads into sales. Your MVP essentially serves as the bare bones of what you need for your company to go live and start returning value on your initial investment.
Knowing your MVP is not only important for new startups either. Established companies that understand your MVP can use it to assess whether or not the resources you’re expending are producing what they should.
Why Your MVP Matters
If you know your company’s minimum viable product, you can focus your initial attention and resources on getting your business off of the ground. Failing to recognize MVP, however, usually leads to your valuable time and money being spent on nonessential elements of your business plan. Not only does this mean that you take longer to start generating sales, it can doom your company before it ever goes live. Many great startup ventures have run out of resource before they could ever land their first real customer interacion.
Let’s run through one quick example to demonstrate minimum viable product in a business setting:
Going back to the subject of our first website-building blog, let’s imagine a real estate website: The minimum viable product for a real estate business might be as simple as a main page, a blog, social media integrations, and three or four tabs on your top menu (i.e. one each for buyers, sellers, and a “Contact Us” page). As baisc as this webiste may be, if you present it in a celan, professional way, it can be all you need to start using using it to generate sales.
Having an actieve webstie also lets you advertise, differ yourself from competition, and build a brand. With a simple, well-designed site, you have the opportunity to analyze how visitors interact while browsing, and you’ll be able to get feedback that can be used when you begin adding more features and pages.
Why is this important!? Well, having this information enables you to make better decisions on what features and niches to get farther into, and which features to remove. Meaning you will save a huge amount of time and money!
MVP Usability
When you are deciding on your MVP, user experince (UXP) is one of the most vital things to consdier. Think of your television remote. How many times do you press the “replay” button compared to how often press the “on/off” button? Because of considerations like this, the MVP for televison remotes may include power, volume, and channel, and menu naviagtion buttons, but not a dedicated subtitle button.
This is the power of minimum viable product! It ensures you get in front of the customers as soon as possible, understand what they need to become your client or customer, and it helps you understand what additional things are needed from you in order to grow your business as efficiently as possible.
Bringing it All Together
Rather than building out a ton of exciting features that don’t stand on their own, staying focused on your minimum viable product lets you come right out of the gate ready to make a splash. When the time does come for enhancements or additons down the road, he data you gather from your MVP site lets you know exactly what will work for your viewers and why.
This is the power of minimum viable product! It helps ensure you can make maximum returns on your investments. At the same time, you can learn the market needs of your product.
Starting with a minimum viable product is a fantastic way to reduce the costs to build a professional website, while also increasing the return on your invested capital (meaning getting in front of clients or potential customers sooner rather than later). Then it’s also a fantastic way to test the market and see what works and doesn’t work. Helping you remain more competitive.
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