Target Audience

The first question to consider in designing and building a website is to establish the business purpose behind it.  In other words: What do you hope to achieve?

As obvious as this question seems, it is actually overlooked in favour of exciting creative designs and technical possibilities. Once you have established what you'd like to achieve, you should then consider who your target audience is. Who is most likely to benefit from using your website?

We can then ask: Is the purpose of the site compatible with the target audience?

Here are some questions to consider:

• Inform? Educate? Excite? Sell?
• Is there a competitive aspect to your site?
• What can you learn from your competitor websites?
• How does the website fit in with and complement your over-all business marketing strategy?
• Do you want to drive prospects futher into your site or link to other sites?
• Do you want customers to conduct e-business on the site?
• If you want to offer e-commerce, do you have the back-end processes in place to make it all work efficiently?
• What is e-commerce anyway? Will it work for me on my site? Is it secure? Is it costly?

The answers to these questions form the fundamentals of internet marketing. If you are serious about doing business online, you need to understand the difference between having a website and marketing that website.

There is little walk-past traffic on the net, and a good understanding of the issues above will enable you, along with your web designers and developers, to build a strong foundation for internet marketing and future growth.