There are multiple categories of websites available on the internet. Before you decide to get yours built, figure out what category you fit in. Take a look at our 5 categories of websites.<\/p>\n
An informational site is just as it sounds, a site that has basic information about your business. It is one where it can be as simple as just a page with a description of your services\/products. With most Informational Sites, there is little interaction and\/or input necessary from the viewer (your customer). You go to an informational site just to get information. Nothing more. Here are some examples of a basic and advanced informational site:<\/p>\n
Basic: A page for a restaurant listing hours of service, location, and some menu items.<\/p>\n
Advanced: A page for a photography service site listing hours of service, location, examples of work (portfolio), ability to contact through a form, ability to schedule an appointment.<\/p>\n
As you can see both, the basic and advanced, version of an informational site is mainly used to provide information about your services\/products.<\/p>\n
If you are planning on selling anything online, you are going to need an ecommerce site. An ecommerce site allows you to put a list of all your products\/services and also gives your visitors the ability to add the product to a cart, order and pay for it online.<\/p>\n
An ecommerce site will also allow you, the owner, the ability to manage the products you\u2019re selling, ie. Adjusting stock levels, adding new products, deleting old products. If you are selling a product, you must have an ecommerce site! If you don’t have one, let’s talk. To have one built is easier than you might think.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re planning to bring together people in a central location online, you\u2019re most likely going to need a social networking site. It gives your users the ability to share and post content on the website. You can add a variety of features to allow collaboration and communication between users of the site.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re going to be developing a lot of digital content, you\u2019re going to need a media site. At a high level, a media site can be something like a news site, a radio station site, or a magazine site. These types of sites should have a way to manage all the media content.<\/p>\n
If the site you\u2019re looking for a website doesn\u2019t fall in one of the four categories, your next best bet is to get a custom built website. This is usually the step taken when you have a lot of unique features you need to incorporate into your website. For example, if you\u2019re trying to build a job posting site with additional features such as posting to social media, being able to manage applicants, tracking their selection process, etc, you\u2019ll need a custom built site. In most cases, you can build these types of custom features on top of one of the four categories of sites from the list above.<\/p>\n