Portfolio Website - Target Audience Profile
My target audience will be split into 3 distinct groups.
My primary target audience is to be educationalists.
Educationalists will be attending my presentation and so are the primary target audience. I will be showing them my work and so the complexity of the site is not really an issue. Because I will be showing them my site in college the speed of the connection is quite high and so the file size of my site can be quite large and graphics heavy if needs be.
My secondary target audience is to be potential employers.
My potential employer will be someone who is quite high up in a company management. They will be looking for someone experienced in XHTML, CSS and PHP. They will be quite web savvy and be able to work their way around quite a complex site without too much trouble. They would most likely be accessing my website from their office and so they would probably be using quite a high speed Internet connection and so a large file size site would not matter as much with this section of my target audience either.
My tertiary target audience is to be potential clients.
Potential clients will be quite different to my other two target audience groups. For them to be looking for a designer on the Internet, and to have come across my portfolio they will be quite web savvy, but too complex a design may confuse them slightly. There is also no telling what sort of connection speeds they will be using to access my site but most will have some sort of broadband connection with only the minority still using a dial up connection. This means that although my site could still contain quite a few images, I would have to be careful not to go over the top and alienate this portion of my target audience. I must also be careful not to alienate my target audience by using mark up which only displays correctly in the latest browers as a lot of the general public may still be using older browsers (the majority IE6).
11 comments:
You haven't specified what platforms some of the Target Audiences are working on. I'd assume a high class design agency would use both Mac and PC.
Again you have only specfied one browser for one TA and that is the potential clients, surely the design agency would again be using a mulitude of different browsers.
I would still try and go for the smallest file sizes and compressions because you are trying to go for a large target audience (all three added together) and a potential client on a dial up connection won't wait 10 minutes for one image (maybe hugely exagerated but its making a point). Surely you haven't forgotten Picture This.
IE6 & 7 are pretty much hand in hand and if it doesn't work in one chances are it work work in the other either. As long as you remember to clear your floats Shouts Mr Burgess
IE6 and IE7 are completely different Chris. It's very possible to create a website that looks fine in IE7 but doesn't work so well in IE6 if you aren't experienced with the common errors between both.
Other than that though, I agree with Chris. Your target audience profiles are too general, and in your primary audience profile - the most important one - you say practically nothing about the user.
Have a look back at the Adobe target audience profiles and see what you could improve.
p.s. (something I forgot to add) IE6 is fast becoming the second most popular browser! It's not quite there yet, but I'd keep watching the browser stats. Even so, that shouldn't be a reason for not making it work in IE6, which you've addressed in your target audience profile.
Chris as we have been told many times we can alter our portfolios many times after finishing the course, for this reason I may have quite a graphic heavy website for the presentation (in case any potential employers turn up) and then alter it once the course is finished so it a smaller file size for all my audiences.
Looking back though I do agree some of my target audience profiles are a little general. I think my primary target audience profile was quite short as I will be presenting my website to them and so they will not actually be using it as much as other target audiences.
Also I am unaware of the educationalists turning up. It's difficult to state much about them when an educationalist can be almost anyone (making our target audiences even bigger)
This course has taught you that all images should be optimised anyway to the lowest they can be compressed, so shouldn't they be set like this to set an example. After all we did a unit on this.
@Craig B - Sorry, I only thought there were only a few differences between the two browsers. I think the first one should be IE7 though is it? At the moment IE6 is the most common browser and IE7 is slowly catching it up.
Not much of a fair fight really as people are being forced to use Internet Explorer when they buy a new machine.
Chris has raised a good point about the detail in some of your target audiences. I do think you have made the best work of your third target audience within which I think you have raised some good points about browser and dial up.
The main educationalists who will be there and the only one that should be the most important is our course leader. That's the purpose of putting it at number 1. I think you know quite a lot about Steve, so you can be quite detailed about your number 1 target audience.
After all, if that's all you can write about your number 1 target audience you will struggle a lot when it comes to making design decisions based on what would appeal to your target audience.
I think you have appropriately identified an appropriate target audience for your portfolio but it is a bit too generalised.
I also agree with Chris about the optimization of your images. You could still have a graphic heavy website if you wished but this would be more appropriate if your images were optimized. This may not effect the page load times on the college computers to a large extent but may benefit other members of your target audience.
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