What do I put on my site?
Overview | 1. Who are your audiences? | 2. What do your audiences want to see? | 3. Provide what your audience requires

1. Who are your audiences?
One of the first things any good web designer will ask is who the audience for the site will be (Hint: there will be more than one audience). Maybe it's for potential new customers, and/or current customers. Maybe it's for employees as well, and even potential investors. The first step in determining what information and functionality should be present on a site is to determine who will be using the site. Once this is done, it will be easier to determine what should be on the site based on those audiences' wants, needs, and expectations. Make a list, it's as simple as that. This list will contain your target audiences.

Once you know who your site is targeted at, the next thing to do is to try to think about what these audiences as a group will want to see on your site. Will potential customers expect to see an address, hours of operations, and a product catalogue? Will current customers want to see specials, maybe information about the background of your business? Be creative, don't try to limit yourself here. Budget and time considerations will limit the list for you, but if you had an unlimited budget and an unlimited amount of time to build your site, what would you want to put on it? Think about these things and write them down. Refer to that list you made of the features you saw that you liked on other sites. This list can be referred to as Audience Requirements. It might not seem like requirements right now, but the next step is limiting the list.

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