lecture 2: audience awareness

It's important to get some idea of why people might want to come to your site. This is more important for certain types of site than others. The best way to illustrate this is by example.

Say you're writing a site for a university society - let's call it the Groat Society. It may seem obvious who your target audience is - those members of the student body interested in Groats, right? Well, sort of, but...

• Are you only preaching to the converted? Do you think more people might want to join the Groat Society if they knew what Groats were? Should you, then, have an introduction to Groats on the site?
• In fact, are you intending this site to attract new members? Or is it intended to be more of a resource for existing members? New members might get turned off the society if they arrive at a front page full of in-jokes about committee members. Existing members, on the other hand, won't want to wade through lots of introductory stuff about Groats to get to the page which tells them when the next Society meeting is. And if you want the site to be for both types of audience - you'll need to make sure they know which bits of the site are more appropriate to them.

One of the main reasons for bad web sites is self-indulgence and this can actually apply to almost any type of site. Sites are written that are interesting to their creators, but they have forgotten that you write web sites to be seen by others. Try, at least, to remember that much when you design your site.

Think about what it is you have to say - to whom you want to say it - and what the best way is to do this. These are always the questions to ask at the very start.

PRACTICAL EXERCISE: at the bottom of your handout is another space left so you can write the answers to the questions posed there (which cover the last two slides). See what you can come up with for your proposed site.