GETTING STARTED> Purpose : Audience : Content : Image : Planning

Audience

Who is it for?

When you're designing a site, you really need to know who your main target audience is. Aside from affecting the style of your site, it will also impact upon your actual functional design.

I hope that you'll consider the usability of your site by those with slow connections, poor bandwidth and firewalls. I'm not saying you can't use any scripts or plug-ins, but try to ensure that if they don't work for a particular user, the site is still functional (like the javascipt navigation rollovers I've used on this site).

A well-designed site should be easily used by newbies, but sophisticated enough to interest web-savvy users. I'll deal with the issue of testing a site later on, but in the early stages it's worth involving some test-users that are representative of your main target audience. For example, if you intend catering for Seniors on the site, you may need to consider larger font and button sizes that are more easily read and clicked on. Ask potential users for a list of their favourite sites, then you can analyse what it is that makes those sites so good.

From a style perspective, your target audience needs to be considered when you design the "look" of the site. If it's a site intended mainly for use by a familiar community group, you can be far more casual than if it's supposed to be bringing in business.

My intended audience for this site, for example, are quite likely to want to print pages out for offline reference. That fact has clearly affected my design - this site should print out more legibly than most.

Take some time to list the characteristics of your intended audience. Who are they, what are they after, how web-literate are they, how good will their bandwidth be, etc.