Introducing the SitePoint Personas

New Visitors

The Newbie Hobbyist

Harvey Randolph (62, USA)

Harvey lives in New York City. Before retiring he worked as a watchmaker, and still tinkers with old clocks and watches, but he sold the business to retire a couple of years ago. He lives with his wife Joyce in Queens. Every winter they contemplate moving south to be in a warmer climate, but decide that being close to their children and grandchildren is more important.

Harvey wants to set up a web site to display his collection of antique timepieces to the world. He lacks any experience with building web sites or with using a computer in general, but he does have a lot of spare time and he is patient.

Harvey uses Windows XP and Firefox, which his son installed for him. He likes that it is easy to increase the text size of any web site he visits, as his vision is beginning to fail him. Harvey also dislikes using the mouse, because he suffers from RSI, so prefers navigating using the keyboard whenever possible.

Harvey is very methodical in his purchases. He is likely to telephone customer support to ask pre-sales questions before making a decision, as he feels more comfortable talking to a “real” person than sending an email, although he is slowly adapting.

Harvey visited sitepoint.com by searching for the term “sitepoint”; this was recommended to him as a good resource for beginning web design.

Questions Harvey asks himself when he visits sitepoint.com include:

• What is this site all about?
• How do I make a start with HTML?
• Why am I unable to see what I’m looking for in the search results?

The Enthusiastic Blogger

Susan Kieslinger (17, Germany)

Susan lives in Hanover, Germany.

She’s a visual arts student from Berlin who lives on campus during the semester and with her parents during the holiday periods. Susan spends a lot of time on MySpace and Facebook, and has a personal blog on LiveJournal that uses a standard template design. She’s a beginner in the world of web development, but she’s very web savvy and a quick learner. Susan speaks fluent German and English.

Recently Susan has wanted to expand her site to add extra functionality, such as creating a portfolio of her artwork and possibly adding an ecommerce feature to sell a few of her masterpieces. Being quite creative she also plans on applying a custom design, and is determined to learn how to go about this herself.

When Susan first visited sitepoint.com, her initial impression was that the site in its entirety was overwhelming. She tried to sign up for a forum account but found the process a bit confusing, and left the site after reading an article on styling forms with CSS.

Susan uses a Mac and browses with the Firefox browser.

Susan is a caring and emotional person, and this is reflected in her humanistic purchasing patterns. Whenever she is made to feel part of a community, she will willingly purchase a product that’s associated with that community.

Susan found sitepoint.com whilst searching for information about styling forms using CSS.

Questions Susan asks herself when she visits sitepoint.com include:

• Where do I start?
• How do I sign up to an email newsletter?
• How do I sign up to the forums?

The Googling Geek

Joseph Forrest (26, UK)

Joseph lives in Leeds and is an advanced web developer, specializing in PHP. He works as a freelance coder and maintains his own blog about programming in PHP. Joseph only recently made the jump from freelancing part-time to full-time, and works for clients around the world. Joseph shares a house with a friend from school, Patrick, who works as a software developer for a big corporate firm.

Joseph shows no loyal behavior to any particular online community. He prefers to use Google to find the answers to technical hurdles that he encounters, rather than asking a colleague for help. He relies on social media sites like delicious, Hacker News and Slashdot to obtain news, information, and inspiration. He listens to technical podcasts while he works and in the car.

Joseph tries to attend at least one international conference a year, and is also involved in organizing his local BarCamp conference.

Joseph is a Mac user and browses the Web with Safari 4.

Joseph exhibits competitive buying behavior. For example, he received an email about the SitePoint book, The Principles of Beautiful Web Design on the same day that he needed to create a design for a client—an area that he wanted to improve on. After reviewing the sales page briefly he decided that it was just what he was after, and purchased the book the next day. Being price conscious he made his purchase from amazon.com, even though he discovered the book via sitepoint.com (thus forgoing the extra goodies that often come with purchasing directly from SitePoint).

Joseph visited sitepoint.com most recently when searching for information about coding HTML email.

Questions Joseph asks himself when he visits sitepoint.com include:

• How do I know if this information is credible?
• How does this page relate to my query?

The Visually-impaired Student

Scott McInnes (23, Canada)

Scott lives with his Dad in Toronto.

His mother was killed in a car accident when he was 11. Scott survived the accident, but suffered injuries to his eyes that left him legally blind.

Scott relies heavily on his computer for his day-to-day survival. He uses the JAWS screen reader, which reads pages on his screen aloud. He uses the Web and email extensively to conduct his grocery shopping, pay bills, purchase music, and connect with friends.

Scott is studying for a computer science degree part-time at university, and has created several personal web sites in his spare time. He enjoys the challenge of presenting information in a format that’s easily navigable by other blind people, and is active in several vision-impaired discussion groups online.

Scott runs Windows XP and uses Opera as his primary browser, largely because of the many built-in accessibility features that it provides.

Scott’s primary motivation when purchasing a book about web development is, understandably, how well the topic of accessibility is handled. He is, however, quite methodical on occasion; he’s very thorough when researching a product online, and will read all of the testimonials and customer reviews about a product before purchasing.

Scott found sitepoint.com while searching for tutorials on sending email using PHP.

Questions Scott asks himself when he visits sitepoint.com include:

• Who runs SitePoint and what do they stand for?
• How do I download the code archive for the book I purchased?
• Can I trust the advice that this company delivers about accessibility?
• Are SitePoint an environmentally responsible publisher?

How did we do? Do you think this correctly reflects the majority of visitors to sitepoint.com, or is there a particular type of user that we haven’t accounted for? Let us know in the comments, read about the process we followed, or take our fun quiz to find out which persona you identify with most! (Hint: it will take less than a minute and you could win a $100 Amazon voucher!