Target Audience

When designing your site one of the first things you have to think about is who you are aiming it at. The target audience. This is to help create the purpose and feel of your website and also to then appropriate your site to your users for what you are offering.

There are too parts to doing this successfully. You need to define the purpose of your site and then you are able to establish audience and define the goals for you and the user.

To identify your audience you are identifying demographics, such as gender, location, age, income, education. Unless you have a clear definition of your audience you will have a hard time directing your site and for it to be successful.

I would like to show you two examples. In my opinion the target audience is different but these two companies offer the same services but I think their approach is very different.

http://www.o2online.ie/wps/wcm/connect/O2/Home/
http://www.meteor.ie/

I fine that 02 is a very clean cut simple website. They are very specific in what they are offering and I find they give off a more professional look due to in my opinion being very corporate orientated as they widely cater for businesses. They do still offer services for the average man in the street but on first impressions for me the appeal of the website differs.

The meteor site I find is very fresh and colourful. Alot more eye catching in the orange as their main colour scheme. On first look over of the site - they do not seem to offer business packages, so therefor they are not having to cater for the wide audience of o2 even though they offer the same services, but again its to different audiences. So on the meteor site the first thing I saw was a image and graphic text offering savings. So already I have seen something of interest as everyone likes saving money and their layout is in a table formation and easy to read, follow and navigate.

I personally am a meteor customer as they were able to offer me something none of the other networks could, so they were my choice due to product, but as a student, that's whats right for me.