All that Jazz and Website Planning
The niche market is the next destination for the mass-consumption industries. Targeted, orientated productions, created for certain consumers.
But mass production frustrates the consumers because it shadows their personality. Personalized I pods, selected news sections in your newsletter, book collections in libraries, customized clothes, more and more niche targeted publications and productions. I cannot tell if the majority will end up having just a slight connection / maintenance support while being, at a deeper level, composed by numerous minorities. But I can observe that the need to be remarked is a powerful one.
In college I was part of a team that had to create a website. I was familiar with the need to create products that were orientated to a small number of potential consumers, but they matched their standards and expectations. My website was targeted on a neighborhood from Bucharest and its inhabitants. It contained dates regarding schools, drug stores, shops from the neighborhood and a lot of pictures.
What I did not know at that time was this: in order to exist for a subject you have to appear in the first two pages of a search engine. For this you need to set the main key words and the general key words. The title and the descriptions the search engine lists must be interesting enough for the potential viewers. Otherwise, they are likely to not even open the site.
The website planning brainstorming process can start with the rule of the 5 W, suitable to any communication situation. Who tells what to whom, when and where?
Whom are you writing to? Answer this and you will also know your competition, you will be able to identify the main domain for your keywords, the ways to lure your viewers and all the other things that follow in the post-planning phase. Already having the two first coordinates: whom and where (on the internet, of course), you must not forget that a webpage that takes a lot of time to load will lose viewers. As Catalin was also saying, everybody wants everything as fast as possible. For the producers, “To be on the wire is life. The rest is waiting.”, as in All That Jazz.
What are the fonts you should use, how many images you should load, what is the best resolution, browsers checking, an user-friendly menu and what makes a menu user-friendly? Details in Website Planning - From Conception to Launching.