How to choose the type of website that matches my business?

You need to create a professional website which is easy to maintain and useful and also matches your projects.

Your website needs to help you:

• get organized

• boost your sales

• retain your customers

• improve your image

• be visible for more users

There are different types of websites:

👉 Showcase website or portfolio: presentation of a project, business, store…

👉 Online store

👉 Editorial website: content creation, blog

👉 Institutional website: internal communication, business websites for professionals

👉 Portals: calendar, forms, group of associations…

To sum up, there are more and more different and customizable types of websites.

How to choose your type of website?

Before establishing your online presence, first, think about your type of website to create the most effective professional website.

Here are the essential questions you need to ask before starting the creation of your website and choosing a specific type of website.

Define your objectives on the internet

• Enhance your visibility

It’s possible to build a professional website to get known and reach more people.

• Improve your notoriety

You can create a website, work or improve your brand and reputation.

• Boost your sales

You can design a website to boost your sales of products or services directly.

• Increase your customer file

The creation of a professional website will also enable you to enhance your customer file: it’ll also be possible to gather contact information to send newsletters or create email campaigns.

• Develop your professional network

Creating a website will also enable you to develop your professional network and eventually find new partners.

• Discuss with others

You can build a website for personal reasons. In that case, your objective is to interact and discuss with other fans or close family and friends when you have a family website.

What is my target audience and her type of website?

It’s important to know your audience when you create a website:

• Would you like to reach your customers directly?

• Would you like to build a BtoB professional website for your partners?

• Would you like to design a corporate website to develop the team cohesion of your company?

Obviously, your website type will depend on your target audience.

What are your resources for the creation of your website?

The resources you have are essential when you choose your type of website. You will need to take the following elements into account before making your decision.

What is your budget?

Your budget allocated to your web creation will mainly determine your future website.

• If you hire a web agency or freelance web designer’s services, it will be more expensive, but you won’t have to worry about anything.

• With a web designer or a website builder like SiteW, the possibilities are more flexible:

👉 You can opt for creating a free website. You will enjoy 5 pages and all the essential features (videos, photos, texts…) to present your work, project, business, or passion.

👉 You can also subscribe a charged and economical package. In that case, you will have a complete and professional website, of which you can enhance its SEO to be more visible on search engines.

👉 Building an online store will give you the possibility to sell online directly while enjoying tools that enable you to implement a web marketing strategy.

How much time do you have?

Take the time you’ll spend on your website into account before choosing the type of website.

It’s better to opt for a basic showcase website with a well-shaped structure and regular updates rather than a comprehensive, unfriendly, out-of-date website.

What is your organization?

It’s also important to think about your organization to maintain your website:

• Who will administrate your website?

• How often updates will to be done?

• Will your website have a blog that must be updated?

• Will it have a forum, live chat, contact form or thread?

If you answer these questions precisely, you have an overview of all the constraints related to web design.

Create a professional website

Choose your website type: what are my specific needs?

Before starting the creation of your website, and depending on your objectives, think about the necessary elements and features.

What do you need?

• An online store to sell your products on the internet?

• Custom forms so that your visitors can submit quotes, get in touch with you directly online, reply to satisfaction replies…?

• A booking calendar to make appointments or book a place for a specific date?

• Google Maps to localize you?

• A guest book to show customer opinions?

• A forum or FAQ section to answer your visitors’ questions?

• A blog to talk about your news?

• An emailing system to retain a community?

What type of website is best suited to my business sector?

Choosing your type of website might also depend on your profile or business sector.

Depending on your situation, you will have specific needs and objectives. For example, if you are a freelance graphic designer, you will need different features according to whether you create a website or online store.

Here is a non-exhaustive list that will give you a preview of the potential type of website in function of different examples of profiles.

What type of website is best suited to a local store or profession?

If you run a local store or dentist’s office, for example, you probably want to increase your catchment area. To that end, the best way is to build your digital presence thanks to a website.

Your type of website might be the showcase website. It needs to be well-structured and give all the useful information about your store:

• localization

• opening hours

• prices

• events or discounts…

Such as for all types of websites, you will need to enhance your SEO. SEO enables you to rank on Google search results, especially thanks to the keywords related to your business sector and geographical area.

In the case of a local store or office, you need to rank on local keywords.

For example, if you are a lawyer in Madrid, you can try to rank correctly on the following research “lawyer madrid”.

Remember that you can also register your store or office on Google Maps to be shown in the Google Local Pack feature:

You are immediately highlighted. The Google Maps perfil indicates your phone number, opening hours and address. To know how to do, don’t hesitate to consult our guide about Google Maps.

Moreover, you can book a domain name to assert your identity and be visible when a user directly enter your name or the name of your store into Google.

To go further

If you create your website on SiteW, you can book a custom domain name in a few clicks.

Finally, a showcase website enables you to add more features such as a booking calendar or contact form, for example.

What type of website should you choose if you’re a freelancer?

If you are a freelancer, you can create a professional website. The creation of a professional and comprehensive website is essential to catch new co-workers and make proliferate your business.

With the SiteW Premium package, you can easily:

• create a website with an unlimited number of pages

• access all SEO tools such as a domain name registration, meta descriptions, custom URLs or detailed website statistics   

• add custom forms to make appointments and quote request more easily

You get a custom, turnkey and optimized forms for your SEO (and success).

For freelancers, a website will be like a business card. In that case, we talk about portfolio website.

The type of portfolio website enables you to present your work to all Google users and catch new customers.

It will be necessary to present and highlight your services and skills.

To that end, you need intuitive web design tools that offer enough freedom. It will be essential to use a web design solution that enables you to release your creativity and assert  your identity.

Therefore, the portfolio website enables you to show your work in its best light and be contacted easily. SiteW offers you templates to create an original, intuitive and optimized portfolio!

💡 Ensure you add a high-visible contact form and offer all the available contact options. You will make your potential customer’s life easier!

What type of website should you choose to sell online?

To just sell online, the type of website that suits you is the online store.

The creation of an online store requires working on its SEO, user-friendliness, and presentation.

Take a picture of all your products and present them correctly to allow the user the feeling of being in a physical store. To that end, you can hire a professional photographer’s services and film short presentation videos and examples of use for your products.

Moreover, think about creating comprehensive and detailed product pages that anticipate your customers’ questions.

You must build a responsive store; that is to say, a store that adapts to a computer and tablet screen, but don’t worry! All our professional templates are responsive and adapt to each screen.

As you have understood, the online store is a specific type of website that requires being well-organized and taking many parameters into account.

So, do your utmost to make your life easier!

If you want to launch into online business, the SiteW Pro package is the best solution to open an online store and sell.

Here are the different possibilities of the Pro package:

• Add easily your products, prices, photos, options, and descriptions

• Implement promotional campaigns:

  • create a customer database

  • manage your stocks

  • choose your delivery and payment methods

  • follow up your orders

  • send newsletters…

Build an online store

What type of website should you create for a business?

As a business owner, you probably have high expectations and much ambition. Therefore, you need a website up to your expectations.

Therefore, a business owner might want to create:

• a professional website for consumers

• an institutional or corporate website to communicate with other professionals (partners or employees).

Therefore, your website must represent your professionalism and corporate image.

To that end, you must bank on the design and level of personalization of the templates offered by your web design solution.

You also need to consider the time you will spend on your website. However, remember that you don’t need to make concessions between customization and ease of creation: many solutions for web design enable you to reconcile both easily.

SiteW offers you advanced tools for the creation of a complete and professional website:

• The features for graphic personalization (desktop background, fonts, transition effects between pages…) will enable you to create the design that suits your website, enhance your brand image and create an effective purchase funnel.

• Customizable call-to-action buttons and marketing tools (customer reviews, direct access to the cart, search bar…) will offer you the possibility to increase your conversion rate.

What type of website should you choose if you are an artist?

Such as for a freelancer, the artist must create a digital presence thanks to a portfolio.

It enables you to present your work, tell your prices and create contact forms within a few clicks to receive your orders.

Whether you are a musician, a photographer, or a painter, our platform will offer you all the useful features for the creation of your online portfolio.

• Image gallery, videos, or playlists will highlight your creations

• Interactive tools (blog, social media, forum, comments…) will enable you to keep a community alive and favour commitment

• Add a calendar might also be useful to display your show and tour dates

Create an online portfolio

For what type of website should you opt if you manage an association

Whether you are a musician, a photographer, or a painter, our platform will offer you all the useful features for the creation of your online portfolio.

The website of an association has specific features: highlight some actions, add a call-to-action button to donate, for example. It enables you to share hosting costs, optimize your SEO and cross traffics to reach a wider public.

Our web design tools adapt perfectly to the construction of a website for an association. SiteW enables you to:

• add a custom button for donation easily

• offer documents you can download

• add links to list your partners…

You will be able to manage your website by yourself, without hiring a professional’s services for the actualization of your website.

Build a website for your association

What type of website should amateurs and fans choose?

You have a passion for cooking, web, sewing or paragliding?

There are as many websites as passions possible!

Your website needs to be easy to use, customizable and adapt to your identity.

Therefore, choose this type of website: a blog. The blog enables you to share your passion and give advice to a community of passionate people like you.

An editorial website with a content with a precise objective, which is regularly updated, might be also interesting for the creation of a blog that gathers passionate people about a specific topic.

As you can see, a website for passionate people must show your activity. To that end, it’s better to use templates that are specific for blogs to enjoy all the essential features.

Use the free templates of SiteW to create:

• your fashion or cooking blog

• your website about pets or beauty

• your gaming website

Create a blog

Choose your type of website to document your personal project

It’s also possible to build a website to organize a private event (wedding, family reunion, birthday…) or share your memories of a holiday on a travel blog.

You can create a free website or build a comprehensive website with a blog. You can add original features to your website, such as:

• a countdown

• a forecast widget for a family celebration

• more hosting to display private photo albums

Our platform enables you to add pages with limited access (access controlled by password or just for the website members), and disable indexing by search engines if you want more privacy.

It enables you to offer an original and completed platform to document your personal project with people who matter to you.

Design a private website

We are hoping that this guide will help you ask the right questions before starting the creation of a website.

If you know perfectly your needs and recourses, you will determine definitively the type of website that suits you best and be effective on the internet.

We wish you to find your type of website to be successful!