Help me! Reaching my Targeted Audience

I have planned to develop a new website with ASP.NET. So, how should i proceed with programming in such a way that I can target my respective audience?

 

I'm sorry. My deepest condolences on your loss.

Generally speaking ASP.NET tends to try and force you to output rubbish HTML, while you can theoretically make a good website with it, I've rarely if ever seen it actually done. I would HIGHLY suggest using something like PHP, PERL or Python instead. PARTICULARLY if you are thinking about using Visual Studio as your design environment since WYSIWYG's and/or fancy IDE's are the fastest route to failure in web design and development.

Content FIRST, create your content (what the site is about) or a reasonable facsimile of future content before you dive into either the front end or back-end of the site. Fancy graphics, silly animated garbage, scripttard enhancements -- these all have to take a back seat to what the visitor will come to your site for -- THE CONTENT. Content is what users care about, Content is what search engines care about, Content is what social media cares about.

Take the content you expect to have on a single page, organize it as if HTML doesn't even exist in a flat text editor. Then mark up that content with HTML to say what things ARE, then use CSS to create your layoutS -- yes, plural on that since there's more than just 'desktop resolution screens' to worry about. That layout should be elastic (adjusting to user font size preference by using EM instead of pixel measurements), semi-fluid (having a max-width declared so it expands/contracts to screen size but won't get so wide the lines of flow text end up hard to follow on larger displays), and responsive (using media queries to re-arrange the layout to fit the screen width).

Design elements like those with fixed heights, fixed size backgrounds, multiple elements of flow text of equal size, and so forth should be avoided.

Then once you have layout and design working on a static page, you slice up the code for it into whatever you are using on the server side to feed it, be it ASP.NET, PHP, whatever.

Content and semantic markup are the two biggest concerns, having social media interaction and content people will want to share with others riding shotgun. Everything else is window dressing. As Matt Cutts told us many times, "Design for the user, not the search engine".

Also keep in mind that text remains the first class citizen of the web; using images instead of text, having massive amounts of whitespace with no text, goofy animations filled with images that have nothing to do with the actual subject -- these are all giant middle fingers shoved in visitors faces saying "I don't know what content is" or "I don't actually care about why you are here".

Concepts that sadly are lost on most if not all the artists and PSD jockeys who know nothing about content of value or accessibility that have deluded themselves into thinking they are "designers".

 

I have no idea why the language you're using to code the site in question would have anything to do with reaching your target audience. Your target audience, in 99% of the cases, won't give a flying purple fish about your code, only what your site contains (content, content, content and content, is the four top things you should care about).

Regardless of what programming language you're using to facilitate the serving of content is really irrelevant, since regardless of language, what you should be serving is correct HTML, with some CSS and perhaps a bit of javascript on the side.

 

HEY Deathshadow,

Two of my sites are already running well on PHP and MYSQL. Even Perl and Python I have tried. My friends recommend ASP.NET. But seems you had a bad experience. Is it?

Yeah! I know ‘content is king’ for every good site when it comes to target audience. But, to some extent your programming, coding does matters in order to communicate with a machine. In that context, I am asking that with the help of ASP.NET, how can I turn my website dynamic.

 

What you seem to not grasp is the fact that your underlying server side language has nothing to do with making a website dynamic. First we need to establish what you mean by dynamic. Do you mean easily updatable via an admin interface? If so, whether you program the infrastructure in php, haskell or asp.net doesn't really matter.

 

In and of itself there's nothing wrong with .net for making native applications; it is simply put the wrong tool for building web technologies as you are going to be fighting it every step of the way. PARTICULARLY if you use any of the functionality provided by visual studio. I've just never seen anything built with it that payed the slightest heed to the rules of HTML, rules of CSS or paid anything but lip-service to usability and accessibility. It takes middle-of-the-road tasks, makes them look simple whilst under the hood turning them into unnecessarily convoluted messes.

It gets worse in that anything you build with it for the most part is restricted to hosting on Windows. If you are REALLY lucky it may run on Mono on a *nix host, but I would not suggest relying on that. A lot of hosting providers will politely tell you to go *** yourself on Mono support limiting your options even further.

Tying your self to any particular OS or platform can really bite you in the backside long-term. I've seen far too many businesses pretty well shtup themselves by going that route.

ASP.NET is to web technologies what Visual Basic was for Windows Applications 20 years ago; a crutch used by the inept to THINK they can make a program when they quite clearly cannot.