Understanding the type of people who visit your site is a very important task because armed with
this information you are able to use it to enhance your website to suit them. As a result, you will gain more loyal returning visitors that will want to come back again and again for more of what you are providing.
Questions that you should consider when attempting to understand your audience. What is the age level and what kind of knowledge does your audience have? A layman might linger around a general site on gardening, but a professional botanist might turn his nose up at the very same site. Likewise, a regular person will leave a website filled with astronomy abstracts but a well educated university graduate will likely find that site interesting.
Take your audience’s emotional state into consideration when building your site. If a very irritated visitor searches for a solution to a particular problem and comes across your site, you will want to make certain you offer the solution right up front and sell or promote your product to him second. In this way, the visitor will put his trust in you for providing the solution to his problems and is more likely to purchase your product when you offer it to them after that.
When you design the layout for your website, you have to take into account the characteristics of your audience. Are they old or young people? Are they searching for trends or are they just looking for information served up without any icing on the cake? For instance, introducing a new, exciting game with a simple, straightforward black text against white background page will definitely turn prospects away. Make certain your design suits your site’s general theme.
Try to sprinkle conversational language in your sites now and again where you see fit and you will create a sense that your audience is on common ground with you. This in turn builds a trusting relationship between you and your audience, which will come in useful should you want to market a product to your audience.
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Great post, very informative. All too often people fail to think about their audience’s wants/needs first and their web design second. I was recently in the market for a custom governemnet website. Again, with this type of website, I recognized that the needs of the users would be highly different than say, that of an e commerce site or B2B site. With that in mind, I found a great site, CivicPlus.com and they specialize in the type of website design I was looking for:
“Our experts create custom city and county government website designs that serve as a communication and marketing tool for your community. Visitors look to it for information on trips they are planning; prospective residents use it to get a feel for your community prior to moving; and businesses consult it to gage whether or not to develop in your area. Our goal is to design a website that will leave a lasting impression on site visitors and help attract economic development, visitors and new residents.”
It’s good to know some design firms still keep these things in mind before they let their client make all the decisions without taking into account their audience.
Very nice information. Thanks for this.