Just who do you think you are talking to?

Novice web authors who use KompoZer to express their thoughts need to keep their audience in mind. WYSIWYG HTML editing opens the Web to anyone with the patience to use the tools. An interesting thing about the Web is you are simultaneously talking to no one and everyone. Your audience may be baseball players or people who make doll clothes but your thoughts appear for the entire planet to view. Choose your message wisely because you don’t know who is in your audience.

Momma always said…

Momma always told me never to write anything I wouldn’t want her to read on the front page of the newspaper. The fact is anything written anywhere can become a part of our permanent record of history. You can write something and throw it away but it can be recovered from the dump and published. In the physical world writings can be destroyed beyond all recovery as long as there are no physical copies.

In the electronic world almost anything that is written can be recovered from your local drive or especially from the web. Once something is published to the web it is easily copied, captured or backed up.** You might be surprised at the number of emails that can be recovered from ISP backups. Once your thoughts hit the Internet you can assume it is on the front page of the newspaper.

Momma also said never tell a lie if you can get caught. That seemed to allow a little wiggle room but then she added, “There is no lie you can't get caught in” to make sure we were on the straight and narrow. How many times have we seen a public figure trapped by what proved to be an absolute lie? A lie on the Web is even more deadly.

“Just who do you think you are talking to?” Momma

Usually when Momma said, “Just who do you think you are talking to?” someone was in for at least a lecture. My lecture is the “whom” you are talking to could be no one or it could be an impressive audience. Blogs, for example, tend to be ramblings but some are regarded as important to thousands. Some of you have told me that I ramble so I know I’m not talking to no one. I doubt that I'm talking to thousands.

Knowing who you are talking to on the web is essential because of the way your audience finds you. When building your page consider what search terms your intended audience will use. I did a post on that subject, two in fact, and said that my audience would search on, “WYSIWYG HTML editor, Nvu, KompoZer, free software downloads, and beginning web author.” My intended audience is the novice rather than the pro because I’m only a little smarter than a novice. With those search terms I could catch just about anyone, including expert authors, and that is the point.

Defining your Target Market

It may be difficult to define and especially difficult to limit your target market. The target market is the group you hope to attract and motivate but searching on the Web casts a pretty wide net. You never know who you will catch. The corollary is you may not know who you want to catch.

Lets say you have an extremely technical product and you think you want to talk to (address and adjust your page content) engineers because only they would understand how superior your product really is. That may be a good strategy but the guy with the problem (and the money) is the CEO and he may not have an engineering background. You need to address a broad range of visitors to your site with good content and organization.

Limiting your audience is not an easy task. I once tried to define my audience on a support forum by saying:

This forum doesn’t need to be a global repository of knowledge covering all programs. This needs to be where the perplexed come to find out which KompoZer button to push. I want this to be where the once perplexed (maybe even some highly qualified geeks) come to help the perplexed because it is a good thing to do. bulbman

That seemed like a reasonable statement of what the forum was to be but, unfortunately, I was not able to keep the ship on course. It became infested by experts, real and imagined, who so bludgeoned novices that posting almost stopped. By forgetting the audience and just exactly who they were talking to the forum became dysfunctional in terms of its original target market. Once a site or a business does that it is the beginning of a death spiral.

Controlling the direction of a public forum where anyone can post is more difficult than controlling the content of your web site. One of the best posts on the forum noted that KompoZer was a tool for web authoring. How well web authors use the tool (or learn to use the tool) to present their content may be another matter but content is clearly under your control.

Visitors can leave in a click. Usually that is less than 5 seconds if they don’t like what they see, can’t find what they are looking for or don’t understand what they find.

Choose your message wisely.

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**Post Script: Screen Capture Tool
I thought it was strange when I found a Gladiator Security Forum topic on Graphics Software. I wondered how that related to their mission and why it was there. You may wonder the same thing about this post. I guess it was on Gladiator (and it is here) because it is really pretty good stuff and free as well.

FastStone Capture is described as “a powerful, flexible and intuitive screen-capture utility. It allows you to capture anything on the screen including windows, objects, full screen, rectangle regions, freehand-selected regions and scrolling windows/web pages.” I agree that it is intuitive (I can use it) and powerful. It captures anything on the screen and saves it in any format you can imagine. It is a nice piece of work and free for personal use. For me it is a perfect tool to use with KompoZer or any HTML editor. I use it here so remember you are writing for the front page of the paper.

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