The Purpose of Your Business Website

Many websites are designed and built with no purpose in mind. They appear to have badly fitting parts that are haphazardly put together. Those websites don’t provide a reason or inclination for visitors to stay.

When you are designing and building your website (or having someone else design and build it), you need to have a definite purpose in mind. Depending on the type of business that you have, the purpose of your website will vary. The following are some really good reasons to build a website:

• Selling your products and services
• Publishing news items
• Blogging or having social interaction
• Displaying an online catalogue or brochure
• Having a gateway or portal to other sites
• Offering public service or special interest
• Having a virtual gallery or imagery

A great deal of businesses that are in the service industry start out with a basic catalogue or brochure that demonstrates what they have to offer. This type of website is generally the easiest to build.

If you are trying to sell one of your products, you will need a sales letter on your homepage. If your true intent is to sell your products online, you will need Ecommerce features on your website as well.

Online catalogue sites that have Ecommerce are not usually as simple to build. The best example of this is Amazon, which is known as the world’s largest bookstore.

Gateway or portal sites used to be very popular. However, if you want to have a gateway or portal site, you will have some stiff competition from established sites. However, on a positive note, you may be able to do well with a niche portal that focuses on a topic on which you are an expert.

A blog site is a wonderful way to promote your expertise and knowledge, have discussions with similar-thinking people, or provide a discussion forum and customer support. Blogs are great personal publishing sites and are highly regarded as part of the evolution toward social networking and Web 2.0.

If you are a photographer or graphic artist, you can have a site with powerful images, slide shows, and videos. In this day and age, most people have broadband connections so the extra bandwidth that is needed is not really a problem anymore. Numerous businesses work much more effectively if the website presentation is artistic.

Whichever type of website you design and build, make sure that your purpose is clearly defined. Think about what you specifically want your website to accomplish and what your visitors will want to do on your website. Also consider the type of content that you are trying to present and the best way to do that.

Once you are clear on this, you need to write a couple of paragraphs that can serve as your mission statement. Your mission statement should clearly define what the purpose and goals of your business are. This will set the tone for your entire website.

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