What is your websites target audience?

This discussion learned me a lot of things. Some of the comments which have been posted there are of a great value to me, because they are well argued and well considered. You should check it out…;)

The discussion also made me conclude that you, as a webdesigner, need to determine what the target audience to a given site is, before you start designing. Often, webdesigners design a website from the content of the site. If it’s a website for baby-clothes, most designers would design in “baby-colors”, right?
Instead, why not build a site of elements, which all in some way relates to the target audience (in this case the parents)? I don’t know if it will work, I haven’t tried it yet, but if it works you’ll ensure that your clients get the best overall experience of your business, and that’s what you’re heading for! If you give your clients a nice service and a good overall impression, the word about your business will spread!

E.g.:

You’ve sold a targeted site to a client, the client gets a lot of deals from it
= good experience

You’ve sold a untargeted site to a client, the client gets a few deals from it
= bad experience.

Therefore it is very important to know what works and what doesn’t, in different audiences. I’m not an expert in this field (deciding what works for different audiences), but I don’t think it’s that difficult.

The only thing you have to do is research. I think it would be a clever idea to find a person (or two) in your network who represents the target audience more or less. Ask what the person finds interesting about the design of a website, what does he/she like about websites in general etc.
You could also look at statistics of other sites. Which sites does people find confusing? which sites is the most visited? by what audience? There a lot of questions you could ask, and it all ends up in questions about your target audience, hmm…

Following this method, I believe that you’ll be able to create a more useful website than if you were without the knowledge about the target audience. As said I haven’t tried it out yet, but I think it could be interesting…

This is an experiment, if you try it, please let me know how it goes…