Define Your Audience

When you know your users like the back of your hand, you can aim your site straight for the target and hit the bull's eye time after time.

You don't have to hire a big name design firm and spend a million bucks to reap the benefits of using good tolls to build your site. A website is simply an extension of your vision for your business, and like any successful component, it needs its own little business plan. This just means getting a few things straight before you touch a single thing on your site. Defining who will be the primary and secondary users of your website can make a huge difference in the way you design your site, the technology you choose for it, and the content you put on it. Your primary users, or audience, are those for whom you're primarily making the site that is, your target market, the people you hope will be using the site 90 to 95 percent of the time. Your secondary users would be anyone else you think might use the site.

This might seem obvious, but you'd be surprised how many people throw up a website without first profiling who their main users are, what those users' primary objectives are, and why and how their site can satisfy those objectives. If you're making a site to which you hope eighteen to twenty five year old guys will flock, it's going to look a lot different than, say, a site for new moms. Having a clear picture of who your users will be makes the job of designing a website much easier, since you'll be making your site for real people, not just an abstraction in your mind. Whenever there's a question as to whether a design element be it the colors, layout, words, images, or special features such as Flash is appropriate for the site, you can just refer (and defer) to your primary and secondary user goals. If it doesn't match, don't bother. It's that simple.