Your website is a communication device. You hold a message about an idea, service, product or lifestyle that you would like to convey to your audience. Designing a website with your interests will not help you to reach your viewers. The website must be designed as your audience expects, for you to make and maintain contact with them.

Who Is Your Audience?

The people who visit your website do not have the same background as you do. They may have less technical expertise, might be unfamiliar with the terms you use, and could use a different web browser (or version of a web browser) than you.

Finding your intended audience is your first step in tailoring your site for your readers. By knowing who your audience is you can structure your message and your website to give them what they want to know in a manner to which they expect. The following examples of defining your audience will help you customize your website to meet their needs. It is not an exhaustive list, but should help you think of how your readers may consume information.

• A younger readership processes information differently from an older readership. Your style of graphics, or vocabulary used will have to be adjusted accordingly.
• Levels of experience (e.g., novice, intermediate, advanced) may require more synopsis or more in-depth narrative. A novice readership may expect summary information. Advanced readers would appreciate more technically detailed pages.
• Researchers navigate a site differently from shoppers. Your documentation should match their purpose. Researchers might demand articles with supportive data. Shoppers count on reviews from other customers, product specifications and images, and pricing/shipping options.
• Accessibility is another consideration. An audience that is audibly or visually impaired, has motor coordination problems, or cognitive deficiency will require graphics to be specially tagged, text to be resized, or layout to be structured so they can understand your message.

How To Find Your Audience

One way to identify your audience is through market research. Surveys and focus groups are a "shotgun" method to identify your audience. The cost of these approaches is costly, and may not yield a representative feedback of your audience’s goals.

A better method is to meet your potential audience first-hand. Visit the places they frequent. Observe and interview them. Uncover their needs and desires. Note their capabilities and expertise. Understand how they think and what they expect so you can put yourself in their mindset. Develop a rapport with them; they can provide ongoing feedback once your website is running.

What Browser Will Your Audience Use?

Most websites do not typically have to delve too deeply into this question. A standard browser compatibility check should be all that is necessary to ensure that a typical audience can read your page as you intended.

If your audience may need accessibility enhancements, plan your graphics and text so that text (i.e., speech) readers and resizable text keep the integrity of your message. The layout of your page may read one way in a normal browser with a normal view. However, text readers may read the text in a different order. Resizing the text too large or small may disrupt the flow of the page or mask text from view.

When your audience spans multiple languages, you can either try to fit the languages into the same layout mould, or design separate websites for each language. Each option has its strengths and weaknesses. For the one layout choice, your website will have a unified identity, regardless of the language of its message. The text will have varying lengths from language to language. Graphics that contain words may need to be swapped to display text in the website version's language. For the different website approach, your message will be tailored to that audience's cultural expectations of information consumption. The layout will be optimized for length of text specific to that language.

PDAs (e.g., RIM Blackberry, Palm Treo, etc.) or text-only browsers display web pages differently from standard graphically rich browsers. If your web site has a dependency with PDAs, prepare your pages with the necessary stylesheets so that these devices can view your information as expected. Text browsers display readable text from the page, links and their corresponding title attributes, and image alt tag text. If you over-design your links and graphics with ancillary text, the text browser could display your text twice, potentially confusing your audience. As with the text readers mentioned previously, text browsers may read the text of your web page in a different order.

Take the time to read your website as your intended audience would. If they do not understand your message, they will move on to another website that is clearer.