Every website has a purpose. Most businesses use their website to convert traffic to customers but there are other purposes for a website. In this article, we’ll dive into coming up with the right purpose for your website.
When it comes to the goal or purpose of a website, there is no one size fits all. We’ll share 3 main purposes of a website but then we’ll dive into how these shift depending on the type of website you are designing for. Let’s dive into the main purposes of a website and how you can focus on one for your next website.
The 3 main purposes of a website
Generally, we can categorize the purpose of most websites into 3 sections:
- Awareness
- sales
- Information
The 3 main purposes of a website
- Awareness
What do we mean by awareness? Maybe you’re creating a website for a new brand and you want to share long-form written content in the form of a blog. By writing and sharing blog posts, you are creating awareness of a particular topic. If you are launching a new product or service, you want to create content on the Internet that generates awareness, how can you get people to find you online?
- Sales and conversion
One of the most common purposes of a website is to generate traffic and sales. This is usually most suited for a business website that’s selling a product or service. There are many ways to go about developing traffic in hopes of bringing in sales for your business, such as creating funnels with specific landing pages, email option magnets, and nurturing through an email series. But creating informational content on your industry will help bring in and attract the right type of customer.
- Information
Another purpose for a website is simply to share information. Think about Wikipedia, a dictionary or thesaurus, or a news site. Each one of these website types shares an abundance of information on an ongoing basis. You keep coming back to them when searching for a query online. This could also be a curated blog. For example, there are many design blogs out there (including yours truly, Hunters Digital) that create content within a genre to help a specific audience, in this case, designers.
How your website purpose varies across website types
We discussed three general purposes or goals for a website but now we need to understand that there are different types of websites and how these goals will vary greatly across website categories.
Portfolio or personal websites
A portfolio or personal website will most likely have the purpose of awareness. You want to share with the world what you do (this is the visual portfolio portion) and how you can help (this is why you want to generate awareness). The goal of a design portfolio website might be to get hired as a designer at a company or for clients to reach out to you for website design, for example. In this case, the purpose of your website is to generate awareness and lead to the action of people reaching out to contact you.
Business websites
Business websites are dedicated websites where a business can share what they offer, awards and accolades, past examples of work, customer testimonials, dive into specifics on their services and offerings, and just about anything that helps tell the story of what the business does and how it helps people.
The purpose of these website types is awareness as well as sales and conversions. If a business wants to grow its customer base, the best way to do so is to create a website and generate traffic to it with searchable content or paid ads pointing to landing pages that convert. Most businesses these days have a website, it’s the best way for people around the world to find and work with you, Otherwise, you’re limited to customers located near you geographically.
Blog websites
The main purpose of blog websites is to share information. They may want to generate awareness, traffic, and sales if they have a related business but most of the time it’s a website dedicated to sharing written and visual content on a given niche.
Ecommerce websites
An eCommerce website (Sephora.com) eCommerce sites might be a little more straightforward with its purpose. An eCommerce website is an online shop where people can buy products, so it makes sense that the purpose of these sites is to generate traffic and sales. Some businesses have both physical store locations and shops as well as eCommerce websites to reach a larger customer base. When your customer lives on the internet, you have an infinite amount of potential customers you can reach. They may have a secondary goal of generating awareness of the business or product but the sole purpose is sales.
Social media websites
What about social media websites, where do they fall? These types of websites are a little tougher to categorize, in some ways they span all three purposes. Since a user is creating and sharing content on these sites, each one of those users may have their own purpose for the “micro” site they are creating.
Pinterest, for example, leans toward an informational purpose for its social media site. Essentially, they are a search engine. You can search for a specific topic, maybe “healthy dinner recipes”, and you are met with thousands of pins pointing you to recipes from other blogs and websites. However, businesses can also create pins that drive awareness and traffic to their product in hopes of leading to a sale. So in this sense, social media sites might have multiple purposes of awareness, sales, and information.
Know the purpose of your website before getting it designed
As a business owner, you might be wondering if you need to know the purpose of your website before hiring an agency to design it. You could hire an agency to design a website and fill it with content without ever considering the purpose or goal but you would be at a huge disadvantage. Taking the time to think about the purpose of your website, what the main goal is, and how you will measure success will help you create a better website from the start.
