Chapter 8 - Choosing your Audience
Choosing your Audience
Another important step in the web design process is choosing your audience. The layout and look of your page depends on this. You wouldn’t have an interface with a rock band in the background and sirens on your buttons if you were creating a page for a senior meditation group would you? I hope not. So lets see what else you have to consider.
Load Time
You do not adjust only the look of your site based on your audience. You also have to keep in mind the load time. If your site is for seniors, you probably shouldn’t have high quality images with a lot of DHTML tricks, because most of your viewers will probably using AOL - which means your page will take hours to load. On the other hand, if your site was a graphics design site, you might be able to pull that off - because it is more likely that your audience will be using DSL or cable. It all depends on who is most likely to view your site. Thanks to some free tools, you can find out who is viewing your page, their browser, their connection, their resolution, and much, much, more. Click here for details, there are many different services. Also, be sure to ask your host if they have these tools - many do, so ask!
“Alt” Tags
If your page is going to have disabled viewers, it might be nice to use “alt” tags. “Alt” tags are placed in all images, and is meant to describe the image. For example, if you have a links button on your menu that is an image, add this atribute to the "img” tag: alt="My favorite links”. This enables the computer to read what the image is to a blind or handicapped user. Some search engines also look through these, so try to add them. You can view the alt tab of an image by hovering your mouse over them until a yellow box shows up.
Text Size
Text size is another important factor to consider. In IE and Netscape, users can adjust the text size of the page - all in relation to what the size the text was originally. The only problem with this is that if you define a absolute size using CSS, the browser is unable to change it. Therefore, don’t define a size for the body text, or make it big enough to read. I suggest defining sizes only on the menu text, or any other text that will get screwed up if the size is changed.
Make sure you keep all of these topics in mind when you are designing your own web page. Now lets plan your layout and interface!
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