Audience: Designing a Successful Website Part 2of6

Developing a successful Web site involves defining your audience. This is an important first step in the planning process. Your sites audience is a group of people that are anticipated to visit the site in order to achieve objectives, solve problems or get answers. The following questions will help you to define your target audience:

• What is the purpose and goal of the site?
• What do my visitors want to know, want are they looking for?
• What benefits are my visitors looking for?
• What do my visitors want to do?
• How do my visitors to want feel?

Think about the content you offer and who is most likely to need/use it, and write down the characteristics of these users in terms common to your operations. The resulting list of audience profiles may be quite diverse and require you to consolidate users into groupings with similar characteristics. Also, you need to consider that these groups may need to be consolidated in relation to their objectives at the site, thinking in terms of the content they want and how you may organize it. This process works "hand in glove" with the process of Content Assessment and Organization.

Note: if it is determined that an individual will need content offered by your organization on a frequently recurring basis, you may want to consider making a portal application to facilitate this need.

Remember, each group comes to your site with unique expectations. Consider the following characteristics for each target audience group:

• Audience Characteristics (profession, age, gender, needs, etc.)
• Information Preferences (what information the users want first, second, etc.)
• Platform Specifications (hardware, browser, screen resolution, modem speed, etc.)
• Range of Abilities (vision, hearing, web experience, etc.)
• Environmental Challenges (poor lighting, noise, etc.)

Using the characteristics of your target audience groups you can develop a Web site that will effectively deliver desired content to intended audiences.