Knowing your audience when designing a website

When designing a new website it's important to take into consideration the market audience. What is the point of your site? Is it to inform, to sell, to market, to entertain? Think of your audience or your customer base and design the site towards their wants and needs. The main factors that will help you decipher your customer base are age, gender, interest, and economic status.

Age should be the most indicative of your new web-sites content. If you are offering a tutoring service for junior high students it will be important for the site to be especially easy to navigate, writing should be at a seventh grade level, and all advertising etc should be age appropriate. If you are designing a website with the goal of marketing and selling marriage counseling c.d., you will want to target an audience that is of marriage age, probably between the ages of twenty-one and forty-five. You can see that obviously the two examples are going to require the site be set up in two totally different ways.

Gender is another important factor to consider. Content, colors, moods, are going to change depending on which gender you are targeting. If you are not targeting one gender or another, it's going to be important to have content that both will enjoy equally. You don't want to create a scrap-booking site targeted towards men age thirty, and it's probably a bad idea to create a taxidermy site with content for female senior citizens. While I'm sure there are adventurous grandmas who still go hunting for trophies, most prefer to bake cookies and over-feed their families.

Interest may sound obvious, but you would be surprised how important and over-looked interest can be. Your sites information, products, etc should have one common interest, and maintain a certain level of focus. If you have an information site about zoo animals, having articles about non-related topics such as papaya picking, will make the site look chaotic, un-focused, and less reliable.

Economic status is important if you are selling or marketing products. Content, design, products should all be targeted towards or in the same economic realm. You wouldn't build a website that sold Rolex watches with content about beating the poverty epidemic.

As simple as all of these things are, and as obvious as they may seem, the reality is that a lot of new website owners don't take all of these things into consideration before they start building their website, and often-times new websites become a collaboration of the web-owners interests rather than his audience, or customer's interest.