Purpose and Audience of a website

• Every website serves a purpose, whether that be to inform someone of a product or service, or to sell a product, the website has it's own unique purpose.
• For example, a personal website would seek to inform users about the person who the website is about

• When developing a website, or any digital media, it's important to know who the target audience of the website are
• Audiences can be grouped by demographics including:
  • Age
  • Location
  • Competence with technology
  • Education level
• Audiences can also be grouped in other ways, such as based on the purpose of the website.

• Audience is one the first things we need to think about.
• Knowing your audience can help us decide on a colour scheme that helps us captivate an audience, decide what the interface of the site will be and also organise the pages of the site.
• It can also help design assistive tools that will aid with accessibility.
• Remember, the target audience are the people who you are trying to convince to use your product or service.

• Are our audience local, country-wide or international?
• With our landscaping business, we might be looking at people within 40 miles or so of our own home.

• Knowing what age group(s) you are appealing to is perhaps the most obvious way to categorise your audience.
• Different age groups will have several different things about them:
  • Reading levels (young children might not have as high a reading level as older children)
  • Money or no money (young children do not have any money)
  • Access to technology (again, younger and older people might have different levels of access to technology)
  • Travel (same as above, younger and older people might not have access to transport)

• Although this can be defined by age, it can also be classified by where they live.
  • In some parts of the UK, for example, the Rannoch Moor and Glencoe, broadband is something that is still not readily available. 
  • A user without access to a good infrastructure might not be a frequent user of the Internet
  • A user with a slow Internet connection might only be able to view a webpage without any styling or images on it.

• Budget is also very important. For example, with our landscaping website, you might target people with big, big country house gardens or you might target those with smaller gardens. 
• Both of these have different budgets to spend on their gardens.

• Hobbies
• Religion
• Ethnicity
• Marital Status
• Pets

There are many more than just this however!