Posts tagged with ‘audience’:

Hi, I’m Janie Porche.

Successful Web writing,” they say, “is all about knowing your audience.

This is it!  This is the blog post where I’m supposed to introduce myself as the newest member of White Whale.  But who reads this blog the most? Or at least in the finest detail? – probably my coworkers.

So: Donald, Alex, Tonya, Jason–how truly serendipitous.  If the four of you ran a bookstore, or a bakery, or played in a metal band, I’d likely want to join you.  Luckily for us all, I’m a higher-ed Web designer, and you are a purveyor of higher-ed Web sites.  That part worked out perfectly, and I’m proud, so proud, to join you.

But wait!  To those readers who aren’t Donald, Alex, Tonya, and Jason: I’ve been listening longer than you know!  I’ll have some catching up to do with @grether.  I’d like to schedule a garden tour with @davidmsilverSouthwestern, I grew up on your 9-hole course!  Let’s talk about it.

And finally, what to the bystander, the late-night link-follower, or the potential client?  Well, introduce yourself.  This certainly feels exciting, doesn’t it?

Great!  Let’s get to work.

Knowing your audience… and your coworkers

It’s tough to write copy or put together a design for something outside the realm of your knowledge. Though we pride ourselves on being elitist academic types, it does come up sometimes. (Jason once put a beautiful magnified photo of a virus in a sciences mockup. It turned out to be AIDS. Whoops! Lesson learned.)

Of course, internally, you would think that people would shout any questions across the room and notify each other of any mistakes. Tonya has gone from entirely non-geek to believably geeky in her time at White Whale, but when it comes to technical details in a proposal she always runs it by us developers to make sure her take on it is clear.

All this is to say I spotted this on the website of one of those razzmatazz web 2.0 startups:

(And no, Tonya won’t get this joke.)