First Impressions…
Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 
Today I received an email about a friend of mine who will be doing the 2009 IRONMAN in Louisville, KY. So I went to the City of Louisville’s website and was welcomed by the image above. Not a great first impression. I can see how this can happen given the two competing audiences of residences vs visitors, but did it need to? Granted it’s a city managed site that has limited resources etc etc, but there is probably a better way to communicate the junk pick up info effectively for the residence without the negatively impacting any potential tourist/visitor.
In general, it made me think about how important it is to always remember the audiences of your website when adding content…the “s” is important. Website’s usually have multiple audiences (primary, secondary and tertiary audiences) so the content authors/editors of each need to consider the positive AND potentially negative impact a piece of content (and or it’s format) may have on one of the other “non-related” audiences - especially on high-traffic pages such as the home page. It’s a no-brainer in some regards but probably one of the harder things to manage once a site is live and content is added by a variety of people.
But besides all that, it just cracked me up.
