Understand Your Audience

The way you choose to present your information is important.

Do you know who your target audience is? This can make a big difference to how you present your information.

A familiarity with your target market is an invaluable guide to designing your site effectively. It goes hand in hand with your goal statement. The way you choose to present your information is important. If your intended audience receive the wrong visual clues they will be gone long before they can discover just how good the site really is.

If your primary audience is female, 30 - 60 years old, married, in the A/B social category and professional, then designing a site that would appeal to teenage boys will fail, no matter how good it is.

Ask yourself some questions...
Who are they?
What is their age range, sex, marital status, do they have children?
What kind of jobs, earning levels, spending habits, and education levels do they have?
What kind of hobbies, movies, sports, music do they like?
How computer literate are they?
Do they surf from home or the office, which browsers might they be using?
How much time do they spend online?
Which country do they live in?
Are they looking for fun or information?
Are they surfing for business or pleasure?

If you can answer some of these questions you’ll build up a picture of your typical user. This profile will help you to decide on the style of your site and give you some ideas for added content to keep your users coming back for more. If your user profile shows a large proportion of your audience are in the financial markets then a facility showing live updates from the stock markets will be more useful to them than, say, a guided tour of Mars even though a guided tour of Mars might seem more entertaining.

Think about what kind of mood your audience will respond to. What kind of image should you present? Will they expect a dry and informative site or will they enjoy being entertained as well as informed. Will they want to play games or listen to music or get the latest sports news? Do they want to spend time browsing around or are they looking for information fast?

Is bandwidth an issue? Will users be using fast or slow connections to the Internet? Perhaps you expect a large proportion of your users to be using slow connections and older browsers? Keep this in mind when you design your graphics and layout your pages. Large graphics and fancy plugins will lose many of this audience. Attractive layouts which look fabulous in the latest browser version will be ignored by older browsers and may even be so changed as to be unusable. If this is your target audience then you've wasted your time and theirs.

With some idea of who your audience will be you can target your ideas and presentation to address their needs. If the user is looking for fast information perhaps a text only or text and minimal graphics site is what you need. Adding large images, plugins, video and sound to a site like this would only slow down access times and alienate your intended users. If your target audience are young, trendy music lovers then you do want lots of great graphics, plenty of sound and maybe some video or animation as well.

Knowing who your target audience is will help you develop and maintain a successful web site. Use your profile as a tool to examine your content and style of presentation to keep your site focused. Listen to the feedback you get from your visitors and use it to refine the design, keeping the site fresh and on target.