Matching Web Design To Your Target Audience

Over the past decade, web design has become a platform for designers to show off their impressive skills and latest trends to the whole of the internet.

However, websites shouldn’t just look pretty; they should also be functional and work with the target audience in mind. When it comes to designing a website, the target audience of the website is often forgotten about.

A client may end up with a state of the art website, but if it doesn’t appeal to those crucial customers, then you might as well not have one at all. Matching your website and design to your target audience is an important step if you want to turn your website into a conversion machine.

To help you get the most out of your website, we’re taking a look at website design and how having your target audience in mind is the most effective way to build your website. After reading this, you’ll understand how important your target audience is, and how to design your website in a way that your customers will love. Let’s begin.

Determine Your Target Audience

The first step to building a high converting website is to identify your target audience. Knowing your target audience and ideal customer is crucial before you set off on your designing journey. Knowing what your target audience love and hate will have a huge influence on your design and will help you make the perfect website.

If you don’t already have a target audience in mind, then you need to do some market research and look at your previous customers. Consider your industry and the products you’re selling, who are they aimed at and who would be your typical customer? Have a think about their location, age, gender, race, income and even their hobbies.

The more data you collect about your target audience, the more information you’ll have to work with later on. This information will help you make the right decision when it comes to designing that will result in a much better design than if you had a random stab in the dark.

Since different audiences prefer different layouts, fonts and content, it’s crucial you’re using the right one for your audience on your website. If you’re trying to design a generic website to suit everyone, then your results will be less than impressive.

Designing Your Website Around Your Audience

Now that you have a clear target audience in mind, you can begin to design your website around them by making sure you’re using the right typography, layout and style. All of these things will affect how users interact with your website and if they end up buying or leaving straight away. Therefore, getting these design elements to match your target audience’s preferences is essential if you want high levels of interaction and endless conversions.

The first step to designing your website starts with the colour scheme. Getting this wrong could make visitors leave your site in a matter of seconds.

Decide on a Colour Scheme

As you should probably well know, colour is a powerful tool especially when it comes to marketing and design. It has the ability to influence a user’s mood, thoughts and even emotions. Deciding on a main colour can be tricky. The most important thing is to make sure the colour matches the image of your business and the message you are trying to get across.

Take this study by Joe Hallock. After asking people what colour they associated with a certain word, Joe managed to compile an interesting list. Here are the words and the top 3 colour responses for each one.

• Trust – Blue (34%), White (21%), Green (11%)
• Security – Blue (25%), Black (16%), Green (12%)
• Speed – Red (76%), Yellow (7%), Black / Orange / White (4%)
• Cheapness – Orange (26%), Yellow (22%), Brown (13%)
• High Quality – Black (43%), Blue (20%), White / Grey (23%)
• High Tech – Black (26%), Blue (20%), Grey (9%)
• Reliability – Blue (43%), Black (24%), White (8%)
• Courage – Purple (29%), Red (28%), Blue (22%)
• Fear – Red (41%), Black (38%), Grey (5%)
• Fun – Orange (28%), Yellow (26%), Purple (17%)

With this in mind, you should be able to decide on a colour that sums up your website and influences a user’s emotions and thoughts.

If you already have a main colour in mind and need help developing a scheme, then we suggest using Coolors. This helpful tool automatically creates a beautiful colour scheme for you with a click of a button. You can also adjust and edit the colours until you’re settled on the ideal scheme.

Layout

The next thing you’ll want to think about is the overall layout of the website. Although all websites should be easy to read and navigate, your target audience will determine how advanced your navigation should be. Some target audiences will prefer little navigation options with simple to click buttons. Other target audiences will, however, prefer long drop down menus that allow them to access the exact page they one. If you understand your audience enough, then you should know which one they will like.

In terms of the actual layout of elements on your web page, age often is a major factor. Young children and older audiences will want simple-to-use and easily-understandable layouts with lots of white space. Teenagers, young professionals and the tech savvy audiences will want something a bit more complex and detailed in order to keep them entertained. Understanding how your audience reacts to layouts is vital if you want them to stay on your website.

Fonts and Typography

Fonts and the size of the font you use can often help get subtle messages across to users. Websites aimed at young kids will prefer comic style fonts, like the famous Comic Sans. However, if you use something like that on a professional corporate website, it will completely give off the wrong message. Instead, professional websites should use serif type fonts that give a more corporate and serious message.

Font sizes are also important when it comes to designing your website. If set too small, users might struggle to read it, especially older users. Set too big and your website suddenly isn’t serious anymore. Finding the right size of font to use is just as important as finding the actual font.

Content

Now that you’ve chosen an awesome font, it’s time to put it to good use by writing content. When it comes to the content on your website, there are a few things you should consider; first, the overall style of the content and second, the spacing and how it is arranged.

If you have a younger audience or you’re trying to explain something complicated to users, then having spaced out paragraphs with minimum text is ideal. However, if your target audience is consisting of sophisticated users, then they’ll probably prefer reading pages and pages of text. Whatever style you decide to go for, it’s also important you include lots of images to help support the content.

Images

Images are a must have for websites, and they will often be the first thing that users look at upon landing on a page. Making sure you have the right images in the correct style is important if you want users to pay attention to them. Some audiences will prefer real photographs of certain products and services, while some will prefer illustrations to do the job. Identifying which your target audience prefers is essential as it will have a significant impact on the images on your website.

All images should be optimised for fast loading times to ensure a user isn’t waiting minutes for them to load. There’s nothing worse than a slow loading website. If you want to give customers a great experience, then you need to make sure those pictures load fast.

Now that you know how to design the perfect website for your target audience, put all the pieces together and get designing!