Before designing and deploying a new website, you must first understand the intention behind it. Do you want to convert new leads for your service, boost your online sales, or write blog posts about your passion topic? In this article, we go over the seven popular website types and discuss their purpose.
Why understanding your Webflow site purpose is important
In the digital age, the website often serves as the first touch point between you and your existing and potential customers. 71% of all small businesses have their own websites, and 81% of shoppers research a business online before making a purchase. By knowing that, you can understand that having a good website plays a crucial role in your business's success.
Knowing the purpose of your website is the first step in defining a clear strategy for your website. The goal is to create a website that serves your target audience and the pains they are trying to solve.
The 3 main purposes of a website
Most websites fall into three general categories: awareness, sales, and information.
Raising awareness
Let's start with a website whose main goal is raising awareness. Raising awareness is a process that aims to inform and educate your website visitors about a specific topic or your new brand. The idea behind this type of website is to influence your visitor's attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs toward pre-defined goals.
A popular strategy to raise awareness for a new or existing brand is creating long-form written content that follows SEO best practices. Following SEO best practices will help Google show that you are an expert in your field. Writing content about your product or brand will thus help you rank higher on Google and improve your online presence.
Create a well-defined awareness-raising strategy before getting to work. As a starting point, your strategy should include the following pillars:
- The long and short-term outcome you wish you achieve or the problem you wish to address.
- The relevant audience you want to target with creating all your content.
- A consistent communication style.
- Knowing how to implement and measure the success rate of different methods and activities that aim to raise awareness.
Boost traffic and leads
The common purpose of a website is to generate traffic and new leads. This set goal is the most common for companies operating in B2B or selling a product or service in general. The strategy behind this goal is to convince visitors to convert into new leads.
Businesses achieve this by differentiating themselves from the competition by creating a unique value proposition. However, this is often not enough for users to convert. Especially if you work in B2B where wrong choices can impact your business performance dramatically.
To generate new leads, companies use websites to position themselves as dependable, trustworthy, and experienced service providers in the target market. They achieve this by creating informational content on the industry, past work, and a transparent look into the company's history.
To generate leads, companies create funnels with specific landing pages, email option magnets, and case studies.
Share information
Last but not least website's purpose is to share information. The main purpose behind this type of website is to spread knowledge and inform a specific audience. Examples of general informative websites are Crunchbase, Zoominfo, Wikipedia, and others.
You can build an informative website by writing a blog. Writing about a specific topic can help your audience find desired information and serve as a central resource center for their genre.
Website purpose across 7 different types of websites
Now you understand the fundamental differences between the three website purposes. But how do those website purposes apply to real-case website examples?
In the following chapters, we will go through seven types of websites to clarify how website purpose varies across different website types.
Portfolio website
The main goal of building a portfolio is to raise awareness for your personal brand. A classic example of the portfolio would be showcasing your past work, references, and top qualities that make you different from the competition. Creating a good portfolio improves your web presence and helps potential clients to discover you and reach out.
Business website
The business website serves as the face of the company as well as the front door. For many companies, the website is the main acquisition channel that helps grow sales and generate new leads.
The typical website will thus share what they offer, awards and recognition, past examples of work, customer testimonials, and other details that would help with customer acquisition.
The business website actually has two purposes. The first is to improve awareness, and the second is to grow sales and traffic.
Ecommerce website
An ecommerce website is a classic example of a site whose primary goal are sales. The whole reason behind ecommerce is to sell products and services online. The complete strategy is built around boosting sales and generating new leads.
Blog website
Blog posts are often part of a content marketing strategy to grow brand awareness and reputation. Standalone blogs are dedicated to sharing visual and written content on a specific niche. In this case, the primary purpose of such a page is to share information and provide value to its reader.
News website
Another quite obvious example of information spreading page sharing is the news page. More and more news organizations are turning from physical to online forms. However, the goal stays the same, share information with their subscribers and readers.
Video streaming website
Video streaming website is just one of many types of sites that exist to entertain their users. While various entertainment websites may pursue different goals, they all share the same purpose: to attract visitors and keep them engaged for a specific time frame. Such a website also includes interactive elements like chat rooms and forums to encourage user engagement.
A government website
The government website falls into a more complex category. The primary purpose behind government websites is delivering service and not strictly selling. Some sites offer residents unemployment and housing benefits while others serve as information centers for all medical-related things. Non-profit organizations' main purpose is providing service alongside raising money to support the cost of service delivery.
Know what your client wants
Before starting to design a Webflow site for your client, you must fully understand the purpose of their site. You can build a general website following only its brand guidelines, but it will lack structure and action-oriented elements. Knowing your client's goals will allow you to make more informed decisions. As you can now understand, an ecommerce site won't be the same as a government website. With ecommerce, your goal is to create a Webflow site that drives revenue and converts new leads. Designing a site for the government will be focused on spreading information and raising awareness about various topics that matter to the general public.
No matter the website's purpose, every client will want a site that helps them reach their goals. Once you understand the website's goal, you must know how to track its success.
Here are more examples of how to measure success with specific metrics.
- Increase organic search traffic by XY%.
- Increase paid traffic by XY%.
- Decrease bounce rate by XY%.
- Increase pages visited per session by XY%.
- Increase conversion rate for email signups by XY%.
All in all, to build a site that will stand out, you must know:
- The purpose of their website.
- The main goal of their website.
- How to measure success to know when to iterate and adjust the page.
Final thoughts
Approaching website design without direction will likely result in a lousy page not being optimized to reach its full potential. Understanding the website's purpose and goal has many advantages. Some of those are:
- Reducing the cost of other types of advertising media.
- Improving a digital marketing strategy.
- Generating highly relevant customer feedback.
- Ability to clarify the interests of potential and regular customers.
- Boosting revenue and lead generation.
At Flowout, we put a lot of emphasis on understanding our client's needs and requests. We start every project with a kickoff video call where we discuss all the details, project scope, and special requirements. We establish the framework and create a transparent process for making your project come to life. Learn more about our past work here.
