One of the first things you want to determine is who your audience is. By Gail J Berg ©2009
One of the first things you want to determine is who your audience is.
Part of this determination is to understand how your audience will be accessing your website. By that I mean what type of browser and/or operating system your audience will be using. Why is this important? Because it will help you in developing the web site (some features may work better on one type of browser) and if problems arise, you have some ideas of what to test to try and resolve the issue.
The following table represents the browsers or other applications (“user agents”) that accessed the Model Horse Gallery for September 2008 (there were more than 560,000 hits during the month).
# Hits User Agent
1 189925 33.75% +MSIE+7.0
2 112799 20.05% Mozilla/5.0
3 112799 20.05% Netscape 6 compatible
4 80668 14.34% +MSIE+6.0
5 24233 4.31% +itsapic.c
6 23398 4.16% Yanga+WorldSearch+Bot+v1.1/beta+(http://www.yanga.co.uk/)"
7 21613 3.84% msnbot-media/1.0+(+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
8 17142 3.05% kalooga/KaloogaBot+(Kalooga;+http://www.kalooga.com;+info@kal
9 16443 2.92% +Yahoo!+Slurp
10 9274 1.65% ichiro/3.0+(http://help.goo.ne.jp/door/crawler.html)"
11 7634 1.36% msnbot-media/1.1+(+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
12 7478 1.33% +Charlotte/1.1
13 7164 1.27% Mediapartners-Google"
14 6405 1.14% WebAlta+Crawler/2.0+(http://www.webalta.net/ru/about_webmaste
15 6251 1.11% msnbot/1.1+(+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
16 5168 0.92% +Win16
17 4083 0.73% Opera
18 4063 0.72% Googlebot-Image/1.0"
19 3194 0.57% +Googlebot/2.1
20 2886 0.51% )"
21 2517 0.45% +BecomeBot/3.0
22 2275 0.40% +DotBot/1.1
23 1512 0.27% Opera/9.1
24 1390 0.25% Opera/9.5
25 1150 0.20% Wget/1.10.2"
26 1006 0.18% Opera/9.2
27 711 0.13% NewsGatorOnline/2.0+(http://www.newsgator.com;+1+subscribers)
28 682 0.12% CCBot/1.0+(+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html)"
29 507 0.09% Scooter/3.3"
30 459 0.08% +Ask+Jeeves/Teoma
You can see that the top four are a variety of (human- directed) browsers (i.e., MSIE, Mozilla, Netscape, Opera), followed by a number of ‘bots (see “bot” or “crawler” in the name), plus advertising services (see line 13), and even a RSS reader (NewsGatorOnline).
Ah, yes, those ‘bots, sometimes known as robots, also known as “spiders” (think about the “web” in “world wide web”) or crawlers. They are what make search engines happen (think Google, Yahoo, etc., or where ever you think to go to find something online); they check every link and look at every page analyzing it for search terms. They also need to be considered part of your audience (but the kind that don’t care about colors and page layout, more content and words).
If you host a blog, podcast, or other RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feature, the readers (or augmenters, compilers of the news) also need to be considered part of your audience.
Look again at the top browsers. Those are the ones whose features you need to ensure your site is compatible with. (You may need to have two or three to use for testing, or even friends with other versions or operating systems who can help you test.) For instance, some very old browsers have difficulty dealing with frames, so if you had an audience that doesn’t use the latest browser, you may have to avoid frames altogether, or only in limited situations.
Another aspect to consider when determining your audience is the connection speed. Some users with slow connections “turn off” automatic download of images, so having just graphics (e.g., arrows) for navigation may make it difficult for them. As many horse lovers live in remote areas with their animals, they may not have access to high speed connections, unlike urban and city dwellers. Segregating pages with high image content is one way to help users with slower connections more easily utilize your site.
There is a growing audience with mobile handheld devices (cell phones) capable of browsing web sites. Design for mobile devices is beyond the scope of this article, but this Wikipedia article on mobile browsers may provide a starting point for further information for those interested.
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