When you’re developing or revamping your company’s website, one of the key things that you want to take a look at is the type of website that will best support your business. When we talk to clients about a website, we often take the time to investigate what type of website would be most suitable. Trying to accomplish too many goals with your website can cause confusion for your users, so your best bet is to choose one purpose for your website to focus on.
But what are the different types of business websites?
The E-Commerce Website
The purpose of the e-commerce website is to sell products. You can have e-commerce websites like Amazon that sell a large variety of websites, or you can have websites like Woo Audio’s WA-234 MONO which is a website that only sells one product:
The main goal for this website is to get a visitor to purchase from you. Everything on this page, whether it’s a product page, or lookbook, or a collection page, should lead the visitor to purchasing a product from you.
The Branding Website
Typically on branding websites, you will find information about the company, the product and/or the service. It’s goal is to make the user familiar with the brand and to promote name recognition. One really great example of this is Pepsi’s Crystal Pepsi website:
This website is to promote the brand of an older product that was popular in the 1990’s and was recently rereleased. This website emphasizes nostalgia, with reproducing web design trends from the mid 90’s. This was the best way Pepsi could have branded this rereleased product.
The Lead Generation Website
The goal of a lead generation website is to, you guessed it, capture leads. This is great when you want to bring a visitor into a sales funnel or want to develop a deeper relationship with your visitors. Woodco Holdings has a website created strictly for lead generation:
This is often how companies utilize landing pages, as a completely separate entity from their own corporate website. This gives you the opportunity to really focus on the form that users are expected to fill in, without distracting them with other navigation to other areas of your corporate website.
The Publishing Website
Websites that focus solely on publishing are similar to news websites or blogs – these ones often depend on advertisements and sponsored content to generate revenue. Career Girl Daily is an example of this type of website:
This website incorporates advertisements into the sidebar of the blog content, alternating with actual site content. This provides the opportunity to maximize ad revenue.
The Support Website
This website is often used for larger tech companies to support hardware, software or services that they provide. Apple’s Support website is a great example of this:
These websites can often provide frequently asked questions, ways to contact the support department, new software or driver patches, and community forums.
Now that we’ve gone over the five types of websites that can be created, you’ll want to ask yourself what the main purpose and goal of your own website is. This will help you choose the best type of website that you need for your business.
