Module 2 – Who is your Website for?
In Module 1, to explore this question, we used the analogy of producing a poster for a play, or a pamphlet to advertise a nightclub. We suggested that, just as you wouldn’t put your poster up anywhere or give your pamphlet to anyone passing you on the street, you would also not design a website for everyone who visits the internet. The whole focus of any Sales and Marketing project is to successfully meet the needs of the customer, and of course it would be impossible for a website to meet the needs of all potential users. Just as with any Sales and Marketing campaign, choosing the Target Audience is essential when you are designing a website.
But who IS the audience on the web? What kinds of people are using the Internet and the World Wide Web to find information, to become regular visitors to your website, to make purchases and hopefully become clients or customers of yours? One way of beginning to explore this question is to go right back to the very root of the Internet and the men and women who started it off nearly 50 years ago.
The Internet has changed a huge amount since it’s formation by the US Department of Defence in 1969. The US Army wanted to create a ‘foolproof’ system linking all of its main computers together in a way that ensured continued communication if any one computer, or set of computers, went down.
US Academics in Universities and Colleges heard about this system and ‘borrowed’ parts of it to exchange information, papers and research; between themselves, but also with students. They also brought their own computer expertise to this project and were able to develop the ‘Internet’, as it became known, so it was more efficient, robust and suited to the task of sharing information between users.
This wish to share expertise and to make knowledge freely obtainable became one of the distinguishing features of the Internet from the outset.
The rest is history. As computer technologies advanced, more and more computer servers became linked to the Internet and it began to spread across the US and eventually overseas to Europe and other developing countries in the world. At this level, the technology was text and number driven with commands being typed manually. That is, until the start of the World Wide Web, which changed everything.
In 1990, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Switzerland started the World Wide Web as a network service based on the idea of hypertext and hypergraphics, clickable text and graphic links. This made the Internet much more user friendly and easy to use, as it was now based on a graphical interface, not a text and command based interface. In 1992, CERN made the Web software available to the public domain, accessible by the Internet community. Quickly, organizations and individuals around the world started using the Web, developing browsers, adding new features, and developing support for additional platforms. ...
If you would like to read the rest of this module
and the other 4 modules in this e-Course
please follow the Paypal link |
