The first steps in creating content for your site are to define its purpose and identify its audience. You can document this information in a content plan, which you'll use during the building phase.

What’s the site's purpose? It may answer these questions:

1. What is the mission of the organization or company?
2. How will the website support this mission?
3. What are the short-term goals for the website? The long-term goals?
4. What do you want customers to do on the site? How often you want them to visit, how long do you want them to stay?
5. How will site success be measured?

Your site’s purpose can be expressed in a mission statement. Here’s an example:

The purpose of our website is to attract new customers with compelling content and strengthen the loyalty of existing customers by providing 24/7 support.

Who’s your audience? You may have several target audiences. For each, you should know the members’:

• Age
• Education/reading level
• Language
• Subject-specific knowledge and attitudes
• Technical expertise
• Computer equipment
• Conditions of use
• Disabilities
• Income

Why is this information important? Younger audiences may expect hipper language and flashier graphics. Older visitors may prefer a businesslike tone and largerfonts. (Compare www.coolmath4kids.com and www.coolmath4teachers.com.) People new to a topic might appreciate a glossary and FAQ (“frequently asked questions”) page. More experienced visitors would find a powerful Search engine more useful.

It may be useful to create personas for your website's audience. A persona is a biographical sketch of a fictional person who represents one segment of your audience. Although they don't describe real people, personas should correspond closely to what you've discovered about the people who'll be using your site, including their age, education level, familiarity with computers and the Internet, and knowledge about your organization. You use personas throughout the design process to keep yourself focused on your users.

Knowing your audience also means anticipating how they’ll use it. You should be able to answer the following questions and build user scenarios, which are brief stories describing how a typical person would use the site.

• What do they want from the site? What top five things are they trying to accomplish?
• What obstacles will prevent them from accessing or using the site?
• How will they know about the site?
• How do they currently interact with the company or organization?

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Key concepts: content plan, target audience, user scenario

Examples

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More information

• Categorizing Your Audience—Different ways of categorizing Web site users.
• Client-Centered Design—How to work with clients and produce a site that fulfills their users' needs.
• Collecting Data from Users—How you collect data about your users depends on what you need to know.
• Five Things to Know About Your Users--Describes a usability test of Citibank's website by one user and shows how knowing your user affects website design.
• Personas: Setting the Stage for Building Usable Information Sites—Useful introduction to how and why you create personas; includes tips for developing personas and examples of persona descriptions.
• A Process for Developing Technical Communication Products for the Web—Overly academic but useful outline of the steps in the assessment, design, development, implementation and maintenance phases of tech comm projects for the Web. Examples of planning forms.
• Sample content plans— Sample plans created by other students
• Site audience and goals— How to define your audience, create scenarios, and understand the competition (Webmonkey IA tutorial)
• Usability for Senior Citizens—Jakob Nielsen explains why most websites are twice as hard for seniors to use than for non-seniors.

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