Audience
Analysis
One of the first
jobs in analyzing your audience will be to consider the rhetorical
purpose of your web portfolio. What do you intend
for it to accomplish? What's it for? We might even think
in general about what websites are for. What purposes do websites
serve? Or better yet, why do people build websites? Let's freewrite
a moment on this topic and brainstorm some of the various reasons
why people create websites.
Types of Audiences
Most websites
have a target audience, meaning the group of people most
likely to visit the site. This group may be quite diverse, but
they are united by certain common features that can be ascertained.
In order to properly analyze your target audience, you will have
to determine the purpose of your site and the type of people who
will likely to be attracted to your site. How would you describe
the potential knowledges, backgrounds, interests, and needs of
that target audience?
While most sites
have a target audience, there's often a hidden audience for sites--an
audience that is not targeted by the site, but who visits it nonetheless.
What kinds of people might be hidden audiences for your site? How
might you figure out who those audiences are?
Audience Analysis
Look at the following
three texts and answer the following questions two questions about
them.
1. Who seems
to be the intended or target audience for this text? Is that audience
directly addressed? If so, how? If not, how do you
know who the target audience is? Can you effectively describe that
audience?
2. What are some possible hidden audiences for this text? How do
you know what those hidden audiences might be? |
