Independent of your business or professional area, a well-designed website could work for you.

Website is your online business presence, a place where you control your narrative, tell your company’s story to the world and sell your products and services.

It is your channel directly to your customer and prospects and basically, your store online. A place where you have your best sales pitch, calls to action and promotions to reach your target audience.

When it comes to deciding what type of website your company needs, you should evaluate which one will work best for your business purpose.
Each type of website have certain goals to achieve. Here are some of the popular types of websites you can find around the web.

1. Corporate or Business Website

Corporate or Business website is a common type you’ll see around the web.
The corporate type is used to represent a brand and that creates business opportunity.
It is possible by providing valuable content about products and services and special offers that promote awareness and brand loyalty.
A corporate website message must align with the company principles and values. Also, being fully integrated within the company structure and its general strategy.

2. E-commerce Website

An e-commerce website is an online store where you can sell your products and services directly to customers from the web.
Running a business online is profitable as it is cheaper than running a traditional brick and mortar store because of low fixed costs and a wider reach.
Big stores like JB Hi-Fi, Myer, Coles and even Apple use this format to sell their products.
Observe that even though have a physical store, they use e-commerce websites as another way to attract and sell to customers.
Having an online presence enables businesses to sell their products world wide.. A well designed eCommerce website that is easy to navigate with great user experience can help boost sales .
Also, you will have to take some precautions, for example, getting your SSL certificate. It is a digital document to secure transactions, data transfer and logins. It ensures your customer can pay securely.

3. Educational Website

Educational websites include those that offer online courses and provide materials, videos or any other tool that helps the learning process.
These websites could act as a supplement classroom teaching or as a full course delivery mode.
Some educational websites offer subscription models or educational products for purchase, such as complimentary online courses or materials.
Some colleges and universities could use an educational website along side their organisation website to serve enrolments and student needs.

4. Web Portal

Web portals are websites specially designed as an intranet for business or institution presenting in the form of dashboards for their stakeholders.
They bring information from diverse formats and sources together in a uniform way.
Normally, it involves a login and personalized views for different users to ensure that everyone in the organisation can access the information.
Organisations can use web portal to disseminate information, professional development and communication within departments.

5. Entertainment Website

The entertainment type is where people spend time reading the news, watching videos, searching for information or taking funny quizzes.
Buzzfeed is an example of an entertainment website.
If you have an interesting subject to talk about, a creative and valuable content that attracts people, you could create an entertainment website.
If you are good at that, people will look at your content and with revisit your website for more entertainment.
So how do they stay afloat and cover costs?
Normally, entertainment websites use advertisements to cover some of its costs.
Companies that pay for ads show up on the pages with related content, targeting the right audience.
For example, if an entertainment website has articles on technology with high number of visitors, has ads enabled, businesses with related products might show on the ads.

Find out what type of website your business needs

The ones listed here are just a few examples of type of websites you can find on the internet.
The most important thing before deciding which type of website you want to build, first write down your business goals, then your marketing goals and see how your website can help you business accomplish those goals.

5 Most Popular Types of Websites