One of my favorite and most valuable topics that we talked about when creating an effective website is knowing your target market. How well you know your target market’s wants and needs is essential to whether or not they are going to engage with your website. The website you make for a teen clothing store is going to be much different from that of an electronics store as those two companies will have different markets. The clothing store would probably more colorful and have more pictures whereas the electronics store would have a lot of text to describe their products.
The best example of why target markets are so important was Professor Liska’s example about the American Fish Taxidermy websites. In his example he showed us two different websites, one was professionally made, looked clean, and was easy to navigate, the other looks like some random person made it in their garage, it is harder to navigate and it is uneasy on the eyes. To our surprise the website that looks like a random person made it actually sells much more than the professionally made website. This is because the target market of people buying this service are looking for someone who is dedicated to the quality of their work rather than the quality of their website.
Hi Brooke, this is a great bundle of information regarding the basics of targeted marketing. However, I disagree with your conclusion as to why the raggedy website was more effective than the professional one. People are more likely to be willing to pay more for artisinal products than mass produced ones for fear of a lack of care/appreciation for their work. The professional website looks like some sort of factory or corporation owns the taxidermist, whereas the raggedy website appears to be made by an artisan. That being said, I’m now reading back your conclusion as to the success of the website and my argument might just be with semantics. Whoops.
Hi Brooke,
First of all, your dog picture made me want to read your blog immediately. I really enjoyed your blog because prior to this class, I didn’t even think about how important target markets are into how websites are created. However, I also disagree on your ending conclusion. If consumers have not shopped with that company before, they judge the quality of the website to determine the quality of the products meaning the design of the website is just as important as the quality of the product. I know I would choose a different website if the website looks poorly made and sketchy.