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Audience-Oriented Business Goals

At the very least, history has determined that a professional website must strive to reach at least 5 specific goals:

1. To appeal to a global market
2. To operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
3. To instantaneously deliver its products and/or services
4. To automate its back-end operations
5. To work within a simple interface

Although these goals are rather broad in scope, their specifics are what give a website the complete focus and direction that it needs to be successful. Some of those specifics include setting up a secure ordering system, providing customer support, advertising, marketing, and hiring employees. However regardless of its level of detail, each goal of a business website must always address the needs of its target audience.

Many online business mistakenly address the needs of their operations instead of the needs of their visitors, and this is but one contributor of the complexity we all have come to experience on the Internet—and of course, one contributor to failure.

Audience-Oriented Design Goals

The key needs of a website’s audience will set the course for further development because they address things like Internet experience, browser type, connection speeds, and screen resolution.

For example, a website that caters to visitors with little Internet experience should provide a very simple interface with small blurbs of explanatory text next to each button or link. One of the goals in this case would be to offer extensive help.

A website that serves mostly Internet Explorer users can take advantage of advanced Java or VB scripting, whereas a website that attracts mostly low-end browser users should avoid scripting altogether and concentrate on providing text-based content instead.

Another goal of a website that caters to visitors with slow Internet connections would be to display small, fast loading graphics rather than video-laden web pages that are riddled with 400K+ images.

These examples illustrate how a website’s audience literally dictates what should and shouldn’t be part of its design if it’s going to meet its audience-oriented business goals.

At times, audience-oriented design goals may conflict with each other — especially when they encounter visitors who have fast Internet connections but low screen resolutions. To accomplish design goals for such a widely varied audience, it’s best to design a website that satisfies the most common needs.

TIP: To determine what your visitors needs are, check your server’s visitor logs to find the most commonly used browser, connection speed, screen resolution and more. Without these logs, your guess will be as good as any stranger’s.

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