“There are many varieties of Web sites, each specializing in a particular type of content or use, and they may be arbitrarily classified in any number of ways.” Wikipedia
Whatever business you are in, it's likely that you will need a website for one purpose or another, but which type of website will you choose?
The most basic type of website functions a bit like a combination of an entry in the telephone book and a brochure, and is a pure marketing device.
A brochure site can be just 4 or 5 pages in size. The home page will provide a brief introduction to the products or services the company offers, and other pages will give details of the company's background and history, location and contact details, and a more detailed outline of the services or products it offers (generally with some great pictures of successful past projects).
Its basic purpose is to provide a point of contact on the internet, and to give basic information about the company, its history and products or services.
Price guide: from £150 ($300) for a one page site.
On the surface, the subscription site is a single page, with a short sales piece encouraging the visitor to sign up for a subscription to a newsletter. There are various ways of helping to increase take-up, such as video or audio, giveaways, quizzes and so on.
Although it looks straightforward, there is actually quite a bit of hidden work in the background of the page presented to visitors, such as:
It's also important that there is something to send out, before the first subscriber signs up. It's a good idea to put the first 10 or so issues onto the autoresponder and test them before the page goes 'live'.
Often, there are also opt-in tests, comparing click-through results of different headlines, etc.
Price guide: from £350 ($700) for the site, from £75 ($150) for autoresponder setup.
A single product sales page for an ebook or an item of downloadable software is just the tip of the iceberg. The part visible to the customer seems very simple, but there's more to this type of site than meets the eye.
By its nature a sales page needs some way to collect the money from the customer. This is usually achieved in the case of a single product site by means of a Buy Button from one of the leading payment processors, such as Paypal or Google. The information for the payment processor must be software-generated at the time of purchase so that sales can be tracked.
Some payment processors will return the customer to a specific page on your site for delivery of the product, sending all the tracking information along with the customer. Others will simply send you an email, and you need to contact the customer yourself to give them the download link.
Most payment processors will require additional pages, such as a Thank you/Delivery page (whether or not delivery is to take place immediately after payment), a Failure page (in case the sale is aborted before payment for some reason), a Privacy page and so on.
Price guide: from £500 ($1,000).
Like the electronic sales page, a sales page for a single physical product is another situation that looks like a single page site, but the invisible part of the “iceberg” may be much more complex than the sales page itself.
Physical products use a similar process to electronic ones for handling payment, but there is an additional component, as you need to get the delivery address from the customer. In the case of a physical product, the buy button leads to a 2-part form, one part on the sales site, which does the capturing of delivery and contact details, and the other on the payment processor's site, where the payment is processed.
If product delivery is handled by a third party (such as a dropshipper), more information needs to be generated to pass on to them, unless manual processing is preferred.
Most payment processors will require additional pages, such as a Thank you/Confirmation of Order page, a Failure page (in case the sale is aborted before payment for some reason), a Privacy page and so on.
Price guide: from £500 ($1,000).
In order to gain recognition by the search engines and move high enough up the rankings to be found by your target market, an Adsense site must be carefully designed, with Search Engine Optimisation built in right from the start.
An Adsense site must be an information site. We've all come across pages which are just a load of ads. I doubt anybody hangs around long enough to click on any of them - I certainly don't.
The problem is that many sites created purely for the generation of income from advertising are so lacking in anything of interest that they are shooting themselves in the foot. They may have 10 or so articles about the subject they are based round, but this is more for the benefit of the search engines than the visitor. Most of these articles are not worth reading - I know, I've tried!
To be successful in generating clicks, an Adsense site must:
There are two reasons for the last requirement. Firstly, Google expects this sort of site to grow slowly. A site which suddenly appears with 500 articles in place overnight is suspect, and when Google is suspicious, they don't list your site. Secondly, it's easier to encourage your visitors to come back by adding new information regularly.
If they know there's going to be new content, and the subject is something your visitors are interested in (and if not, why did they visit in the first place?), they might want to drop back now and then to see what's new. The Add to Favorites button helps them remember where you are.
An Adsense site designed with your visitors in mind, which makes the effort to cater to their needs and wants, will attract repeat visits - so you have more chances to get those all-important cash-generating clicks. It will also be more attractive to Google, Yahoo and MSN.
Google requires a Privacy page, an About Us page and a Contact page on sites displaying their ads. Additional pages to enhance the value of this type of site are a Tell-a-Friend page, a links page or links directory, and possibly an email capture page if you have something to offer in exchange, such as a regular newsletter, a free ebook, etc.
Because of the amount of information you need to have on a site like this to generate good search engine rankings and repeat visits, it is best created as a dynamic site, where most of the pages are generated “on the fly” from stored data when requested.
Price guide: from £650 ($1,300) for the website, from £100 ($200) for initial articles setup. Requires ongoing investment to keep the site active for SEO purposes.
Whatever you're selling, an online shopping mall is a big project. Your data needs to be captured and stored. Once you have the data, it needs to be examined, possibly cleaned up, and analysed.
Decisions need to be made about how you are going to group items together, what level of search you are going to provide (by category only, by product name, by brand, etc) and how to present them.
Many products could be fitted into several different categories; are you going to display them in all the categories they can fit into, or just one or two?
All this has to be decided before you even start work on the design of the site, as the choices you make will affect what needs to appear. Until you know exactly what is going to be on your pages, any proposed layout can only be very approximate. It's also important to consider Search Engine Optimisation right from the beginning of the design phase.
E-commerce sites are always dynamic, because the contents of the page are unique to a particular visitor-request. The products on offer will also change more or less frequently, and a database makes updating availability details and so on much easier to automate.
Rather than a simple buy button, e-commerce sites require a full-blown shopping cart system, which is usually provided by the payment processor or bought in as standard software. In either case, modifications will be needed to integrate it seamlessly into the site.
Most payment processors will require additional pages, such as a Thank you/Confirmation of Order page, a Failure page (in case the sale is aborted before payment for some reason) - both of which may be included in the shopping trolley software - a Privacy page and so on. An Add to Favorities button, a Tell-a-Friend page and a links page or links directory are useful additions, as are a newsletter (for which you will need an email capture page) and/or regular articles about subjects relevant to your site.
Price guide: from £800 ($1,600) for initial setup. This type of site requires ongoing maintenance on a daily or at least weekly basis.
Social networking sites and forum sites are other types of site which may be of interest to small business owners. Of the two, the forum site is the most viable financially in the short term, although if a social networking site (like MySpace) takes off, it can be worth a packet to one of the big players online. But unless you are prepared to wait a few years before you get a return on your investment, neither of these is likely to be a good choice.
Another possibility is a dating site. In most cases, an existing software suite can be used to build this type of site. There is a great deal of competition in this sector, so unless you are offering something completely different, or are an expert in marketing of all kinds, making this type of site profitable is difficult, though not impossible.
Any site will require hosting, which is an ongoing expense. Free hosts are not genuinely free, since they almost always require their advertisement on every page, and are extremely unreliable, often disappearing without trace with little or no warning.
It is generally a good idea, unless you are yourself skilled in this area, to have a webmaster on call. Rather than employing one, you can enter into a contract with a professional, paying a monthly retainer which normally covers a small amount of work, anything more being charged at an hourly rate.
The Website Design Co UK offers a webmastering and hosting package at £10 ($20) per month.
There are many different types of site online, all designed with a specific purpose in mind. Deciding what you want your site to achieve will usually indicate the type of site you require.
Next: Are Google Adwords "Brown Bread"?
