Planning Your Site

Know Your Target Audience

• Audience: who will use this web site?
• Designing Your Audience: Are you designing for users, viewers or readers?
• Focus: Don't try to reach too broad an audience.
• How do you expect the audience to change over time?
• Involving Users in the Design Process: Ask representative members of your audience for input.

Business sites, nonprofit sites, information or opinion sites and ego sites have more than one potential audience. It's important to know specifically who the target audience is so the site can be created appropriately.

Audiences for business sites may include current customers, potential customers, investors, staff members and prospective employees, all of whom have different needs.

Current Customers: Provide critical information about products or services in a way that's easily accessible to current clientele.

Potential Customers: Separate potential clients into subgroups by level of interest or how they arrived at the site. Did they arrive from a search engine or an advertisement on another site? Did they read a written brochure? Consider providing separate entrance pages for these arrival methods.

Don't overload these people with information. Design elements should convince the customer why they should buy the product or service. Use clear, functional navigational tools to make ordering as easy as possible, and consider including a search mechanism to locate information quickly.

Investors: The company may need to provide financial information to stockholders, potential stockholders and government regulatory bodies. Design elements need to influence people to invest in the company.

Sales Force: The sales force - including distributors and agents - are an important target market. It may be wise for sales information to reside on an Intranet or a secure server. Information contained on the site should contain price changes, policy changes, sales incentives and so on. Examine each design element, and determine whether it will help them sell products or services.

Audiences for nonprofit organizations may include information seekers, donors and activists.

People are likely interested in what the organization believes in, who it serves, how the organization operates and what it has accomplished. However, these organizations need money to operate.

The site's agenda should include disseminating information and gathering funds. Educate visitors about what the organization is attempting to accomplish, and make it easy for them to support the organization financially.

Audiences For Information Sites

Audiences for information sites generally fall into two categories: internal (those on a secure server) and external (those accessing a public site).

Intranets: Consultants, staff members and other people with access need information that is only available internally. These sites may have complicated needs such as security or high bandwidth access. Audio, video or database access may be used to drive important issues home if appropriate and if bandwidth permits. Otherwise, practice restraint. Regardless, design the Intranet to meet the needs of this audience.

Information Seekers: There may be a great deal of information to present and many other sites vying for this group's attention. Organize information in the most efficient and effective manner possible.

Ensure the site is designed properly so that it can be navigated easily.

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Audiences for opinion sites include anyone who holds an opinion for or against an issue or a person. However, for every action there's usually an equal and opposite reaction. Bear this in mind.

Audiences For Ego Sites

The audience for personal sites is essentially only one person - the creator of the site (and possibly friends and family members). Although there are no real restrictions on presentation or content on personal sites, a poorly designed personal page will leave a bad impression on people.

People want to do business with people they believe are professional.

Many organizations include mission statements on their sites to attempt to promote the idea that they're professional. However, it's dangerously easy to go overboard on sincerity and create the opposite effect - a site that seems dissimulated.

Stating the obvious is one of the major problems with mission statements. If the site must have a mission statement, make it a link from the home page so visitors can decide whether or not they want to read it.

Policies: Copyright, Privacy & Ethical Constraints

• What policy constraints do you need to be aware of in your design?
• Copyright Links
• What privacy issues will you need to consider in developing the site?
• Consider legal and ethical aspects of the information you want to distribute.