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Posted by Richard Cornford on 05/28/05 17:49
Travis Newbury wrote:
> Mark Parnell wrote:
>> Travis Newbury wrote:
>>>Should a website cater to the weakest of the surfers?
>
>> When the "weakest" means those on dialup, who still
>> constitute the majority of web users, absolutely.
>
> So if the primary audience has broadband, then it is ok
> to cater to them.
When would 'the primary audience has broadband' be true? (as opposed to
maybe 'the primary audience may have a tendency to have broadband'). For
someone selling broadband upgrades then maybe the primary audience does
have broadband (with a secondary audience who may be interested in
purchasing upgrades for others and using an unknown connection type).
There seems to be a common practice to hiding behind some notion of a
'target audience' where it is difficult to see how such an audience can
have the characteristics proposed for that audience. When someone say
'my target audience all use default installations of Window IE 5.5+'
(and you know that they are not writing for an Intranet where that might
be a certainty) I end up wondering what it is exactly they are selling.
(Superior desktop Windows web browsers? Add-ons for IE?).
Having a target audience makes sense. For an e-commerce site (or an
advertising funded site) it seems reasonable to say that the target
audience does not include those without a disposable income (as they are
not going to purchase anything). And if the produce is expensive (or
utterly trivial) the target audience might be restricted to those with a
larger disposable income. Market research might narrow that audience
down to, say 'individuals with at least a moderate disposable income,
between the ages of approximately 20 and 35 and having a reasonably
active lifestyle' (selling snowboarding gear or some such).
In a non-commercial context another notion of 'target audience' would
apply. I, for example, write web pages about the application of
javascript. Obviously the target audience is people with an interest in
javascript, and not people who's interests exclude javascript.
What I cannot see is how a target audience derived form the relationship
between the characteristics of individuals and the products, services
and content of a web site easily relates to the equipment, software and
general web browsing circumstances of those individuals. Unless the
products, services and content of the sites are themselves directly
related to web browsing.
So when I read someone asserting that their 'target audience' only use
IE, or only use broadband I suspect that it was the web developer who
divined the 'target audience' for their own convenience, rather than
that the target audience was deduced from the purpose of the web site in
question.
And in an e-commerce context I see that as the web developers getting in
the way of the business interests. They act to restrict potential
turnover, rather than maximise it. They may do so because they lack to
skills to do any better (and may even assert that it would be
restrictively expensive for them to acquire and apply those skills
(though they shouldn't expect to be believed when assessing the
potential cost of the application of skills they don't have)), but still
the business has a real target audience related to what it does, and it
is extremely unlikely that that target audience corresponds exclusivly
with the users of a particular web browser, or a particular type of
connection.
Richard.
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