Who’s your target audience?

And what’s your purpose?

Businesses need a website for a variety of reasons. The most obvious one to advertise your business. The internet is a large place and getting larger. In order for this advertising to be effective, you need to decide on a target audience. This could be geographic (Cornwall), demographic (young people) or it could be business to business. i.e. You make ball bearings that you want to sell to engineering establishments.

The targeting of your audience is an important question that needs to be answered when it comes to deciding how your site is promoted. For now let’s leave this until later.

So why have a website? If the first reason is advertising your business, the second could be to advertise your products or services or both. Next thing you might want to do is to sell your products.

Each reason is valid but the emphasis you wish to place on these needs have an impact on the content. For example:
Most sites will have as standard a home page, an about page and a contact page. However, there is much more a website can provide, tips or articles, help files, product details, information about your staff, management policies, sales policies, business availability, galleries, news and press releases and much more. You might like to provide a video for people to download or a colour chart if you’re selling paint, clothes etc.

Content can be wide and varied but the question should be answered after you decide what you want to do with your website.

Hosting
I’ll try to help answer some questions now by breaking down the jargon.
Firstly websites need two things to function; an address and a place to house the address. The address is sometimes known as the url and will often start with www.

The address is generally obtained via the company that houses your address. I will now start to call the address your website and the place to house the address your host (aka hosting)!

Hosting is done on a computer! And yes if you wanted you could run a website from your home computer - but it does take a lot of work and is not very simple - we would all be doing it if it was!!! So to host an address takes a computer that has to be managed correctly. Most hosting companies will also provide bonuses. e.g.
Multiple email addresses
Sub websites, e.g. rich.cregy.co.uk. rich is the sub address.
Databases
Applications for you to run as part of your website.

Suffice to say hosting is a very necessary part of having a website. Cregy offer hosting as part of their website design. And now we move onto the next topic.

Website Design
Some people will know what they want and some won’t have a clue. Colours, shapes, etc. one, two or three column, etc. However, creating the site is one thing, the site then has many aspects that need particular consideration. e.g. accessibility - your website has to be accessible to blind people. They will often use a screen reader to be able to ’see’ the contents of a website. Your site has to be built so that is ‘friendly’ to search engines such as Google! There are many things happening behind the scenes that you might not know about or effect the site design. If you want to know more, simply ask.

Site Promotion
This is possibly the most complicated part of website design. Why? There are so many experts and each one disagree on the most effective way to promote your site!

So why should you promote your site. Simply so people get to see it. If you visit www.google.co.uk and type in the word ‘Lostwithiel’ you will be presented with over a million options to click on. Most people will click through the first three pages and then try a different search for their answer. The key to site promotion is to get to the top three pages. However, getting there can be very hard and time consuming.

This is where the original question comes in. If you want simply to provide an online brochure that existing customers can view then why promote! You might decide that effective marketing can only be done through the yellow pages - good - then add your website address and leave the marketing to that. However, you might decide you want your site to be number one, if so then we have a long road ahead of us.

Earlier on I mentioned including articles and tips as pages. Why? Search engines love articles and tips etc. They like fresh and relevant content. A search engine works by sending out spiders (small programmes) that work there way through your site and check to see whether there is new content. If they find the site is not regularly updated they will visit your site less and less and you will find your site heading downwards in terms of where you rank. However, if they keep finding new content they will keep returning and consequently your site will rise in ranking! I wish it was this simple though! Because the content needs to be relevant and more than just adding a new product for sale! Hence why tips, articles, etc. are so important.

Two other factors are important in site promotion. Keywords and links into your site.

Keywords are words that people are using in searches. i.e. On visiting Google, there are a lot of people that are currently searching for the term ‘world cup’. (As I write this the world cup has just come to a conclusion). Armed with this knowledge if you have a world cup product we would ensure that this is well known and keywords submitted to promote this fact!

Links into your site are important but need to be relevant. Links into are those links coming from external sites. If you visit lostwithiel.org.uk and navigate to the directory you will see businesses listed with there website addresses. This is the sort of link you would want to encourage (particularly if you are a Lostwithiel business. The link is then seen as relevant as well).

Finally, there is also something called page optimisation. This means taking the content of a page and using its keywords to ensure the content of that page reflects the keywords. For example. If our keywords were world cup (I wouldn’t normally limit the keywords to two). We would start the page with the title “World Cup”. A title tag is something search engines look for in content and assume that it has an importance. In the opening paragraph we would ensure that we again mention the term world cup and then offer the service or product. Now when we come to link to this page instead of linking simply to Cregy Web Design, we would link to Cregy Web Design and the World Cup. We have now started to optimise the page effectively.

Our friendly search visits the external site and discovers a link to Cregy Web Design and the World Cup. It follows that link to our world cup page and sees that the title is - World Cup. It then notes that the article features the words world cup and that we are offering a create a world cup web page service. It concludes that the world cup is high on our agenda and adds the search term world cup cregy web design to its database.

Simple isn’t it!

Conclusion and Costs
So why have I written all the above? Simply to give you an idea of costs and to give you the information you will need to manage the costs. For example, hosting will cost £100 a year, however this can be more if you want an exceptional amount of content. A client of mine runs his family tree from his website which has over 10,000 entries and photos. This is a massive site and as such incurs additional charges.

Site promotion can cost from nothing to £2000 per annum! As part of a design package you will automatically be entered onto Google, Yahoo, MSN and Dmos. However, getting to the top three pages of these search engines takes a lot of work and hence the £2000! It really is your choice and needs to be made only when you know what you want your site to achieve for you.

Costs
Our standard web design and hosting package costs £370 per year or £30 per month. This includes hosting and site design and creation. Content will be added but updating the content will be the customers responsibility.

Our medium package allows the above to updated and includes extras such as galleries, forums, faq pages, etc. This costs £550 per year or £45 per month.

Our delux package includes online booking or an ecommerce shop and costs £950 per year or £75 per month.

All the above packages include submission to search engines but no additional promotion. Our site promotion charges are as follows:

Our starter package cost £30 per month. We will seek to update content for you monthly generally by adding articles or tips etc or content that you provide. Images can be added. We will also research link sites. The link sites researched will be free linking.

The next stage is difficult to gauge and we would recommend sitting down and talking through the options.
The options include:
Researching keywords.
Advertising through Google etc.
Link sites including sites that charge.
Optimising pages

This is where you need to head back to the original question. What do you want to use your site for? Promotion of your site is important and needs to be carefully considered. I have included the standard package so that you can start to get an understanding of what is needed. But in reality I would generally encourage you to consider spending an advertising budget and also to spend time in page optimisation.

Over to you.

Who’s your target audience? And what’s your purpose?

Who’s your target audience?
The duty of a writer is to think of the reader first, last and always. The same is true of the web designer. You must have a clear idea of whom you are attempting to reach in order to be effective. A website of interest to teenagers, will not interest adults. Women and men respond to different approaches and topic areas. Individuals of different occupations, educational backgrounds, ethnic and cultural heritages need to be approached differently.

How?
So the question is: how do you go about doing this? The first step is to imagine a typical visitor to your website. This does two things. First, it makes the concept of audience analysis more concrete if you think about it in terms of a single person. Secondly, it reminds you that no matter how many visitors come to your site, they all come one at a time. All communication in the end is one-on-one.

Demographics. Consider the basic defining characteristics of the individual. Some basic considerations include: age, gender, ethnicity, cultural background, language usage, educational background, occupation, political affiliations, religious background, and special interests like hobbies.

Psychographics. Originally coined by marketing experts during the 1970s and 80s, this refers to the setting in which the person receives the message. For instance, what time of day are they accessing the website? Are they surfing from home? At work? At school? Do they use a public computer or a private one? Do they have time to read something long or are they in a hurry?

What’s Your Purpose?
Once you have a clear idea of your visitor, answering the next question becomes easier: Why does this website exist? What are you giving to this typical visitor when they arrive?

Before you think about design or graphics, HTML code or search engine submissions, you must answer these two questions. Without having a clear vision of your audience and your purpose, regardless of its technical perfection, your website will fail to see the results you desire.