When building a website, it pays to have some notion of what kind of website you need. Thankfully, you don’t have to come up with everything entirely from scratch. There are plenty of great examples to look at, and a lot of them fall into similar categories. Here, we’re going to look at the 12 most popular types of websites, their main web design features, and benefits worth considering.
Business website
This is a rather broad category, as it largely covers any kind of website designed to represent a business. It may play a key goal in helping the business grow leads or win customers, such as using top-notch UI UX to guide visitors closer to the point of conversion. In most cases, business websites highly branded sites, with pages providing helpful information on the company, services, and products.
Brochure websites
The easiest way to think of these is as a mini-business website. While most businesses need to be online, many do not need an extensive website. Instead, these sites tend to consist of a few simple pages, laying out the basics of what they provide and some contact details.
Ecommerce websites
Online shopping has become a significantly larger part of the online world. Amazon is the most broadly known ecommerce site, but several businesses sell on their own site. Ecommerce websites are a type of business website, but require a little extra specialization to build, so it’s worth looking out for an ecommerce website design professional if this is what you’re after.
Infopreneur website
Fitting into both the business and ecommerce categories, these websites are designed to sell information and insight. Often, they are written as blogs with access to paid materials like videos, eBooks, webinars, and tutorials. Beta and Beyond is one of the leading examples of infopreneur websites.
Web portals
Often used internally at businesses, non-profit organizations, and other larger bodies, these sites are designed to connect users to different resources, such as information, software, and other internal websites, in one place. Web portals tend to be difficult to make, requiring a high level of programming skill, and require login details to use.
Media websites
This covers a wide range of blogs, online publications, and online representations of TV news channels, papers, and magazines. Media websites pull stories and publish them as content. This includes sites like Buzzfeed. Media websites can dip into other categories, as entertainment, but primarily focus on news.
Entertainment websites
On the face of it, these websites aren’t built to drive a business, but rather to purely entertain the audience. This includes pure entertainment publications like Cracked, gaming websites like Newgrounds, and more, like webcomics, blogs, and so on. Most do make some money through advertising, or by selling branded merchandise.
Portfolio websites
Largely used by business 2 business brands, self-employed professionals, freelancers, and small business owners, these are websites that host a professional’s portfolio of work. For instance, a professional digital artist will likely have a list of brands and teams they have worked with, a page detailing their professional history, and a page dedicated to showcasing their past work.
Non-profit website
Non-profit organizations such as charities need websites just as much as businesses do. Not only do they often offer a means to donate online, but they are also a great place to showcase the accomplishments of the non-profit and to provide informative resources on the problem the non-profit is trying to create. The WWF has a good example of a well-designed non-profit website.
Educational website
As the name suggests, these websites are designed either to provide educational materials to visitors or to provide information on real-world educational institutions. A school website may have information on the school, faculty, curriculum, extra-curricular facilities, calendar, and more. There is also a growing environment of online education platforms like Udemy that offer courses that can be taken directly through the website.
Wikis
These websites take most of their design inspiration from the first and biggest of them all: Wikipedia. As such, they’re built to provide an easy way to search through and read on all kinds of information on a particular subject. Some Wikis are designed as information resources for fans of certain properties and media franchises like the Pokémon Wiki, Bulbapedia. Others, like Wikitravel, are designed to help people know what they need to know about a hobby. In most cases, wikis are community-run.
Personal websites
These websites do not strictly exist to sell products, but often act as a platform for a wide range of individuals to simply produce content on their thoughts and what is important to them. A lot of personal content is found through media sharing platforms like YouTube, nowadays, but there are still plenty of personal blogs, photo diaries, vlogs, and podcasts out there. Sometimes, these personal websites do end up with enough of a following to make money, but it’s rarely the initial focus.
Nailing what kind of website design, you want is one thing, but making sure you have the right website developer or designer to help build it is another thing. I Concept has a team of web professionals on hand that has helped build countless websites, contact us today.
