Know Who You're Targeting

Know Who You’re Targeting

July 12th, 2008 | by Scott

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understand A reader emailed me to ask if I would check out his blog recently, and I found something that I see happening a lot out there and thought would make a great post topic here. I won’t name the actual person who emailed me or reveal his site info here, there’s no need to and my point certainly isn’t to embarrass anyone.

The first thing I found when I looked at the blog was a wonderful, spiffy design. Lots of graphics that looked great and weren’t too bloated so they didn’t cause slow page loads.

Next I saw that he had all of the latest widgets and social media badges installed. Normally I might give a big high-5 on that, I’ve written a lot about how I love social networking after all.

But the problem is his blog topic is pretty much focused towards middle-aged and senior readers. People who, for the most part (there are exceptions to every rule) aren’t going to be “up” on the latest technologies and online trends. So all of this stuff on his blog is really just noise to those visitors that distracts them from his actual content.

In addition, he was offering “special secrets & deals” for people who subscribed to his RSS feed.

sourpuss That’s great, except that I suspect the majority of visitors who find his blog through a search engine aren’t going to know how to do that, and there’s no “how to subscribe” information available on the blog.

A good “how to” for RSS is the least that should be up there, but given the nature of his target audience I’d suggest making the RSS feed available by email too because RSS can be too confusing or intimidating for some, but email is far less so.

The last point I had was with the blog navigation setup. He had it displaying older posts by dated archives (by months) rather than by category. Personally, I’m a fan of showing both (and using robots.txt to tell search engines which to ignore), but again when your demographic is going to be folks who aren’t on top of online technologies the standard should be to display your archives by category.

There’s a good chance they won’t even think to look in “August 2007″ for more information on “red widgets”, but a greater chance they will click on a link that says “Widgets Information” for it.

The bottom line for him, and for you to take away from this, is to know who your target visitor is going to be and plan your design–from graphics to navigation, bells and whistles–accordingly. Don’t confuse people with anything that isn’t important to them or your bottom line.

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