Designing for a larger audience
Although a small island, St Lucia has an international audience, and we in St Lucia often forget that. Our local view fogs our ability to see how others see us. As a web designer I try my best to cater to the needs of the client as well as the potential clients viewership – his or her sites success relies strongly on whether or not the sites audience will buy the product or service of my client. Often it is a fine balance to get this right as many clients want what they want and neglect there clients wants/needs until it affects their own business. That’s where we come in.
Do they listen?
A question worth posing, because – as the Americans often say “the client is always right“. Wrong! – I disagree. The reason I am hired to do my job is usually based on a couple of reasons: 1. because the client does not know how to go about creating a website by themselves, and 2. because I know what I am doing and I have a wealth of experience that my clients are looking for.
Now don’t get me wrong – “Wrong! – I disagree” - that is indeed a harsh statement to make and not necessarily absolutely true but I wanted to get my point out there. Yes, I am being paid to cater to my clients needs but also it is my responsibility to guide and educate my clients of other possibilities, technologies, opportunities and directions that they can take. I pride myself with offering this to clients as often they have a great idea and thats it, just the idea – they choose to move forward with there idea but have not taken the time to fine tune the idea to it fullest possibilities. I digress.
Sites can be designed in any number of ways, you can cater to your own needs; you can cater to your audience; you can choose to cater to specific audiences and you can provide a solution for a large audience catering to a number of individual cliques. This is one of the opportunities I have recently been given, the opportunity to build a CMS that will cater to a mass market.
A New Client
How does one approach this issue – let me start by providing you with a scenario:
A client is looking to boost there online profile in order to increase there viewership and profit margins. They want to go bigger and better, more focused information – more information in general. This is what we have offered to them in the form of a fully capable CMS system allowing them the ability to start off with a new and better design, more focused information and the ability to control there own expansion by amending there own info, adding new content and providing a resources/reasons for people to regularly use their site.
A limited audience at present (maybe, by I need to confirm this), but potential is huge. We now need to design a site to cater all that we just mentioned AND provide a solution that will cater to a (potentially) much larger audience. How much of this is our job and how much it is the requirement of the client to drive forward the process? We want to provide all that we can but do not necessarily want to do everything for the client, even if it benefits us in the end. Where does it start and where does it end – how long is that proverbial piece of string?
Now here do we go from here? The process starts with research, lots of research. We need to see where they stand now, how their audience is and have they captured the right audience for what they are offering. We then need to work on the architecture of the new site to best cater to both a clean and easy site to navigate and a CMS that will be easy for them to use. It’s strange, even though I have been through this process many times before, each and every new client poses new challenges and new potential – and each and every time I feel as I have never done this before and provides me with a bit of an uneasy feeling. But once I start the process it always just falls into place and the process becomes comfortable, maybe even easy! {smile} I guess we will see!
The research begins and the process is just starting.. we will continue and learn as we move forward and will hopefully remember to inform you along the way.
These are just thoughts on a process – I also wanted to mention (more as a disclaimer) that the images used above do not represent work that we have done but act more as an example of things to come. The middle image is australia.com, left my Facebook page and on the right the newly design BBC.com website.