Stumbling Blocks to Web Site Success - Know Your Audience
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I hate to think how many times I've written that phrase, but it's really important and bears repeating. Once you know your site's purpose, you need to figure out who would be interested in what you have to offer. For example, a site named SexyShoes.com with a focus to match the name probably won't appeal to men unless they buy shoes for their girlfriend (unheard of) or cross-dress (possibly more common, but definitely a niche audience).
You can be very specific when it comes to figuring out your target audience's demographics. Consider gender, age, occupation, income levels, where they live, what they like to do for fun...the whole nine yards. If you've been around for a little while, you can even ask your customers to fill out surveys. A while back we ran a survey for visitors to our family of sites, and offered nice Dev Shed T-shirts to the first 300 respondents. We learned something about our visitors; it helped us with our sites' focus.
But you're not done once you find out who your audience is. You also need to find out what appeals to them if you want to attract them to your web site and convince them to spend some time there – or convert, if that's your goal. To use an old cliché, if you're designing your web site to appeal to heterosexual men, you wouldn't use pastel colors. If you're designing a web site to appeal to retirees, you might use a slightly larger default font in consideration of senior eyesight, keep the look of each page clean and simple (a good general rule in any case), and take extra care with your navigation. If you're designing a web site to appeal to teen-agers, you're (probably) not going to include articles on how to save for retirement, plan a wedding, or buy a home.
Knowing your audience also means knowing where they hang out online. As Klingsheim pointed out, “A link on a Harry Potter fan club forum to your website can bring in traffic, but does it really bring in the right customers?” If your web site is focused on the craft of making lace and sells supplies for this, you wouldn't leave a link on, say, Dev Hardware, which is dedicated (mostly) to discussions of computer hardware and some software.
At this point I will mention key words, but only to say you should make sure you're using the right ones for your web site. Popularity matters to some degree, but not as much as you'd think. True, you don't want to optimize for key words that no one is using when they search. On the other hand, you don't want to attract 1,000 random visitors who won't convert, when you can attract 100 visitors who might.
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