The visitors of your future websites - who should be numerous and ideally buy your product, make use of your services or examine the information you provide thoroughly. In order to achieve that, you need to get to know your visitors, as well as their habits and wishes. That is the first step in planning, because otherwise the budget for your Internet appearance will produce nothing but an Internet address which will at best be useful only as a note on your business cards or stationary.

Archomedia will therefore help you to answer all relevant questions and finally provide you with a precise profile of your visitors and lay the groundwork for the following approach:

• Who visits your Internet pages?
• What is the target audience looking for and
• what is special about that target audience and needs to be considered?

The following examples demonstrate how important the "Who" question can be: a video game developer generally has young, tech-savvy customers who often use the Internet for business or educational as well as private purposes. These customers will have a fundamentally different perception and expectation compared to the target audience of a doctor, who has patients and website visitors from all age groups, but places an emphasis on elderly visitors because he might be offering special information on preventive health care for elderly people. The elderly visitors of the doctor would be overwhelmed by the flashy but complex navigation on the video game developer's page, while the young video gamers would be bored by the navigation of the doctor's website.

With that you of course have to mention that more and more elderly people play video games and that very young people already consider the health issues related to age. That means that it isn't usually all that simple and the solution has to fulfill multiple requirements. Archomedia will however support you in that and work out the best possible concept for you.

Such careful planning is also essential as far as the information that is necessary for your target audience is concerned. A visitor will usually only dedicate a couple of seconds of his attention to an Internet page before deciding if the desired information is present or if the information provided is interesting. In order to win the customer over within these decisive seconds, you must not leave anything to chance. The information that is important to the visitor must be easy to grasp and accessible via short ways. Product spots and information excerpts on the entry page (the first page a visitor sees when he visits your Internet presence, usually the front page or so-called landing pages) must stir up the interest of the visitor and send him on a tour of the web pages.

The example of the doctor's page demonstrates another special consideration: because it is becoming more and more important to improve the usability of pages for people with seeing deficiencies, impairment of the motor nerves or other limitations. They keyword is accessibility. Elderly visitors of the doctor's pages might depend on an enlarged display of fonts. That can be achieved by conforming to web standards, among other things, which guarantee the functioning of aiding programs these people might use.