Redeveloping Your Website: know your website audience

You know who the audience for your business is already – the people who buy your products, the people your business targets. Of course, in a perfect world, our businesses would appeal to everybody, but that is just not the reality. Being strict on an audience makes things easier because you don’t have to try to impress everybody. Instead, you can focus on the people that really matter, those who are going to buy something.

A demographic comprises of elements such as age, gender, occupation and education. All of these should be considered in order to make your site fit for its audience.

Much of this comes down to age because each generation has grown up with a different set of technology and different ways of communicating. Younger generations have grown up in a multimedia age, therefore a website aimed at a younger audience should be visual and interactive. This can be achieved by incorporating videos and social media elements into your site.

Generally speaking, a website aimed at older generations and those less tech-savvy is likely to be simpler and employ images and text more than anything else.

Content

The use of language, design elements and images must appeal to your demographic. For text content and blogs, using industry jargon can be a way of engaging with those from a particular profession. Formality and tone can also be adjusted according to whether you are targeting executives or labourers. This also applies to design and images. For example, you would expect bright colours and exciting images on a website aimed at children and a sleeker, professional feel to a website aimed at the business community.

Accessibility

It’s all well and good having a beautifully designed website with suitable content but if your audience can’t use it then your business may suffer. Websites aimed at the elderly, people with disabilities and impairments and websites that attract a multicultural or multi-lingual audience, must cater for special requirements. This can include having font options, so that everyone can read the text on the site, having additional versions of the site written in different languages or just making navigation really easy for those with little computer experience.

Goals

Slightly differing from purpose, but just as important, is knowing the individual goals of the website, or sections of the website. Goals help the fulfilment of your purpose. I will only mention this briefly because it will come up in greater detail throughout this guide but this is another consideration that should be in your mind throughout the entire redevelopment process.

Enjoying This Article?

Never miss another one...

Sign up for our e-mail newsletter and we'll let you know when we publish new pieces like this to help you on your marketing journey.

Whereas ‘purpose’ details the overall aims of the site, goals are all about individual, measurable objectives. This could mean, for example, that somebody joins your mailing list, downloads something or even views a portfolio page.

Call to Action

Each page has a purpose therefore each page must have a ‘call to action’. If you’re looking for leads, contact forms and ‘contact us here’ links are the calls to action that encourage people to share their contact details. It should be imperative and should indicate urgency. It is a vital part of a webpage because it’s no good persuading somebody to do something without telling them how.

I think that should give you a few things to think about. Next time, I will talk to you about where to start when you are ready to build your new website – keep your eye out for it next Friday!