Six Questions for Blogger, cont.

The subject of this series is the amateurish and ineffective explanations and directions on Google's Blogger, the site that hosts this blog. The series began with an introduction on May 16, 2008.

Question #1: Who is the target audience for your house-written text?

Target audience. That's the first thing editors want to know—need to know—about a publication or website if the goal is effective communication.

It's the same for marketers, advertisers, and product managers, only their word for audience is customer or client.

Of course, you can't always know everything you want to know about the audience. And even if you could, knowing everything does not guarantee effective communication. But it's the starting place. It provides direction that shapes every decision about organization, vocabulary, voice, length, display type, and other qualities of the written word.

The house text on Blogger reads as if it's written for people who don't need it; that is, for users who are already Blogger veterans. This suggests that the writers are more-or-less writing for themselves and that there's no experienced editor involved to ask the right questions, seek answers, and measure results.

Consciously or not, young and growing businesses often neglect the expense or bother of fundamentals like good written communication. This may be understandable in the chaos of early growth, especially growth fueled by eager and forgiving early adopters. But Blogger is nearly 10 years old. Its ignorance, inattention, or for all I know, hostility, to effective user communication sets a bad precedent and threatens to limit future growth, which depends less and less on the web savvy and more and more on people who just want to get their word out.