Who Do You Write For?

It may seem like an odd question to pose, however a recent post over on the search.ie forum made me think about it.

When I was in my first year in UL one of my lecturers gave us all a handout which went over the basics of writing essays.
One of the points that was emphasised was the audience ie. that the essay, or any other piece of writing, should be written for the audience / reader.
Whether you are blogging, posting to a forum or writing content for a website, you should take the potential reader into consideration.
In some cases this isn’t really an issue, as the audience for a post on fine tuning Mailscanner, for example, should have a certain understanding of email and related issues. However, as I’ve seen in recent weeks, this is not always the case.
Sometimes I post things here that I think are interesting, but as the underlying information appears obvious to me I don’t go into much detail.
For example a couple of my posts on Ubuntu related matters have attracted a lot of traffic from Google users who came in search of simple, easy to understand instructions on installing certain software on their computers. As I didn’t post all the commands required to install the software I was talking about this led to confusion.
Website maintainers have to take into consideration the search engines when constructing content, but they also have to bear in mind that the users that arrive on their sites from the search engines are humans, so they will get confused by strange turns of phrase, bolded type and odd combinations of headings. The problem for the webmaster, therefore, is to write content that works on both levels.
Not an easy job at the best of times …..