How to determine the audience for your site?

Now to make an effective web design, it is crucial to know your audience.
But there could be around thousands of different types of users for your website.
It would be a tough task if not an impossible one to know each and every user type.
What could be the solution in such a scenario?
We have something known as a persona, which is similar to stereotype.
A persona could be a single user who represents different types of users.
It is a fictional user who could represent common characteristics from a similar set of users.
These characteristics could be then related to their habits and web experience.
This could be like how long a user surfs the net daily, which all sites does he/she visit in that period.
Some of the characteristics of the persona could be:
1. Name (just for easy recall)
2. Age
3. Internet usage
4. Age Group
5. Web Browser he/she uses
6. Operating System he/she uses

Also remember although a persona is a fictional character to represent a set of people, but the data about the persona should be facts and not fictitious in nature.
You could get these information through interviewing , surveys and focus groups.

Tip: Create atleast two personas, a primary and secondary persona, because you could have users who don’t necessarily fall in the primary persona, so those would get covered in the secondary persona, also this allows you to widen the scope of the audience who would be using your site.

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