Most website communications strategies can be based on the answers to two questions: Who is Using the Internet? According to www.worldinternetstats.com 68% of North Americans are using the Internet (we will focus on North America because we are an English language company). Of these users, 89% of people with an annual household income of more than $75,000 are online and 88% of people with a college education are online. 78% of people aged 18 to 29 are online and 74% of people aged 30 to 49 are online. Users are more or less evenly split between rural and urban and male and female. These demographics indicate that most sites should use language that appeals to younger and well educated audiences, who probably dont have a lot of time on their hands. But don't make the language too complex. The reason is in the next section. How Are They Using the Internet? According to an article by TJ and Sandar Larkin in Communications World, the publication of the International Association of Business Communicators, the strength of website based communication is the ability to search for and retrieve specific facts and information. The weakness is a low level of comprehension. Information that requires a higher degree of comprehension should be printed on paper. This is because the website user is thinking about where to go next and not about what they are reading. So it follows that key points should be readily identifiable, key information should be in point form with links to longer documents and that documents that require some comprehension should be available for printing. |
