Another Way Of Segmenting Your Visitors

Posted on September 26, 2007
Filed Under Web Design | Leave a Comment

The first to do on Website To Dos is Decide Upon Your Goals And Audience. In the case of Website To Dos itself the goal is to raise the average quality of web development, especially when it comes to those obscure but important technical bits. The most obvious way to define the intended audience then is: Web Developers (amateur or professional). Along with that probably comes a whole mess of stereotypical views on what other segments they are going to fit in to.

But a post I’ve just come across probably describes the site’s audience well and in a way I had not even considered before.

The post is The Constructive Pessimist and, along with a superb example that does a great job of explaining the different types, I think it defines what will be a characteristic of most regular visitors to Website To Dos.

Website To Dos clearly caters to those who are pro-actively seeking information on what could go wrong with their web development. (And I’m hoping and assuming that they are doing that in order to pro-actively stop it from happening.)

As I said, I think the post in question gives a great example of how the differing outlooks would regard a problem. Now, I’d like to propose how I think they would react to one of the Website To Dos To Dos, namely canonical redirects.

The Destructive Pessimist surely has to do a chicken little. This To Do is mainly aimed at avoiding the cases where the search engines come to regard multiple versions of your code as duplicate content. A little further reading on the subject will lead to the idea of other people actively trying to usurp your position in the SERPs by hijacking your own content and this is a harder, though less widespread for the less popular site, problem to solve. It would be easy to throw up your hands in despair when you come across articles like this one.

The Destructive Optimist is going to point at the huge number of sites that do not have a canonical redirect and do not have duplicate content issues. A bit like a smoker pointing out there 90 year old, 60 a day grandfather while ignoring the wards full of cancer patients.

The Constructive Optimist is perhaps a harder one to imagine. I think they would come across the To Do, implement its recommendations when creating the site and then assume for evermore that they are protected against canonical issues. These things need to be checked periodically for misconfigurations, cases that weren’t relevant when the site was created but apply to new functionality etc.

Finally the Contructive Pessimist, the visitor to this site I hope, is going to not just take to heart the To Dos mentioned on the site and implement the recommendations. The constructive pessimist will periodically check that their solutions are in place and that they cover all current functionality of their site. Probably they will also take the knowledge gained here and go out and learn more hopefully, when they discover new issues, using the contact form to let me know so I can add them to the site for others to learn from ;) .

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