• about
• contact
• advertise
• archives

Elements of Web Design: Audience

September 30, 2003 | View Comments (2) | Category: Design

Summary: Gotta know your audience if you want to make something decent and relevant.

As I said before I believe your message is the most important aspect of your site when designing it. For me, the second most important issue is your audience. When designing a site it might be easy to say that you are designing for everyone, but you must realize that every site serves an audience.

When I say this I do not mean generic audiences like single white males age 20-35. What I mean are specific types of audiences. For this site I perceived my audience to be web designers and others who may have some interest in design or programming for websites. This along with my message helped me to develop the design of the site. I realized that most designers work with resolutions above 800x600 and so I made my site liquid. Content wise, I know I have to bring something different to the table to attract readers because there are plenty of other well-established design blogs out there and I also know what kind of style and tone is allowed. Finally, I knew that most designers would respect a minimalist site because they would also see the usability involved along with the design and understand that it is not easy designing something simple that is different. Once you have figured out your intended audience (besides "everybody") then you can have a better idea of how you should structure your site.

Look at the majority of programmers' blogs and you will see that they understand their intended audience, even if they do not know it. A programmers' blog like Simon's or Sam's does not try to wow you with their designs. Their intended audience is more than likely other programmers who can actually understand all the technical and programming information that they talk about. Programmers may not care about the look and feel of the site just as long as it contains interesting content for them to go over. However, if you are a designer and you are creating a blog, more than likely you would love to garner the respect of your peers so maybe you should put a little more thought into your blog.

When Dave talks about colour I know that he must have some general idea of what he is talking about before I even read the entry. Looking at the site I can see his use of colors and therefore already make the connection that this site is made by a creative designer. I am sure being a well-respected designer Dave knew that his audience might be looking for a little more from him. Zeldman knows that his audience will more than likely accept the use of radical colors such as pink and peach because they are designers. Since he knows his audience it allows him the freedom to experiment with his design because his audience is more forgiving.

Sometimes it can be hard envisioning your audience or if you are working with a client who does not know their audience then you may have to come up with your own audience. Nobody talks about this better than Keith Robinson in his article Persona Sketching for Better Web Sites.

Reaching your intended audience on the web can be very difficult since the web is international and it is hard to track what type of people come to your site. However, this should not prevent you from trying to design for a specific audience at the beginning. If over time your audience changes, then maybe you should think about a redesign. However, just try to keep your audience in mind when designing your site.

Trackback URL: http://9rules.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/14

Comments

Keep track of comments to all entries with the Comments Feed