What working radio taught me about Web Design

Sometimes you can't please everybody, in fact I learned why designing for everyone doesn't work.

This post is inspired by a good friend of mine, Steve Drees and Henry Balanon's post on twitter.

"Lets make a radio station that everybody enjoys!"

When I worked at KADU in Hibbing, MN some people in the community might say "Play music everybody likes" problem is, you can never really do that. I wish it was that easy, in the end you'll end up with one of two things.

1. Play everything, make everyone happy.
   What you really end up doing here is making everyone disinterested, for every song they might enjoy there is one 2 other songs they can't stand, so they'll switch the station, not hear the ads, and the station goes belly up.
2. Play fluffy stuff that offends no one.
   Here you're left not standing out at all, and while there is a market for this, it's not very interesting and doing the elevator music scene isn't all that exciting.  It's not so much that everyone enjoys it, but no one hates it enough to say anything (looking at you easy listening).

In the end we ended up doing market research, finding a niche, and targeting that demographic.  What you end up with is a wildly loyal and excited audience, vs 10 times the audience who can't even find the station on the dial, but stumble across it once and a while.

Now for us at KADU, we were a bit ahead of our time on some things, and it ended up flopping, but no guts no glory right?

So what about design?

Well it's true you can be mildly successful doing something so bland that no one hates it, but even then visitors can pickup on that. The web is all about community, do your research figure out your typical visitor. If you can put 75% or so if your visitors into a targeted demographic, do whatever it takes to make them love your site and become part of the community.

I'd rather have 10 dedicated customers (fans) than 1000 visitors who stumbled by never to return.

Some examples: Scott E Vest Leo Laporte Woot.com

Each of these sites have clearly identified a demographic and targeted them and then get the best sort of advertising of all, Word of Mouth.