Types of Websites and How to Design Them?

There are about 1.13 billion websites on the entire internet. Websites are of different types and serve different purposes. Some websites like E-commerce has the goal of making you buy something while some are just a blog to share information. Because of these differences in the goals of the websites, all these different types of websites have to be designed differently.

Types of Websites

Types of Websites

Websites depending on their use case are of five types, let’s discuss these types along with how to design those types of websites:

E-commerce Website:

E-commerce websites are web applications or online marketplaces for buying goods selling goods or facilitating both services. The design of these websites is quite complex so a lot of thought should go into designing it.

E-commerce Website

How to design an E-commerce website?

Follow these points while designing an E-commerce website:

• Product Showcase: For an E-commerce website, the goal of the website is to sell a product which means that the focus of an E-commerce website is to have the visitors look at the product. This is where Product Showcase becomes important. This means how you wish to showcase your products, if you wish to do it through photography which is the standard for most of the E-commerce websites. Decide on how do you shoot the the product – is it on a white background? Is it when somebody’s using it? Is it from all different angles? you as a designer will have to come up with the whole product showcase experience.
• Checkout Experience: Checkout Experience must be well designed because this is where the money is being charged. So if we design a bad Checkout Process, our client may lose money. The most important thing is to make the Checkout UI look safe, secure and trustable. For that you can –
  • Use blue color, since it denotes trust and security
  • Follow the standardized icons and text for checkout
  • Make sure your checkout has no bugs or overflowing text/image.
  • Use proper Call To Action and copywriting

Marketing and Business Website:

Marketing and Business Websites are the most popular kind of websites because every business in the world which needs a website to communicate what services/products they offer. Unlike E-commerce websites that are selling their services and products online Marketing and Business Websites are just to introduce a business to the users. Even if it’s an offline business, people may check it on google to see what services the business offer, is the business legitimate or not and get more information about the business through their website.

Marketing and Business Website

How to design a Marketing and Business Website?

Follow these points while designing a Marketing and Business Website:

• Clear Description: Our website must have clear description of what we do and what services we offer. The website should have a clear introduction of what the business does, and the story of the business that is, how the business came into place, why was it born.
• Benefits: As a Marketing and Business Website, people will only come in to the website to look out for value. Cleary list down the benefits that they will get if they buy something from us rather than from our alternatives.
• Credibility: To create Credibility, use social proof which means showing that other people have worked with you in the past because we as people have a bias and we think that if other people have already worked with you and done this thing in the past it’s probably more safe and secure for us as well. So if we show these are the clients we have worked with, this is what our other clients are saying to us, we are actually using the psychology of social proof to make people believe that we are credible and more trustworthy.

Blog/Media Outlet Website:

Blogs and Media Outlet websites are the website where we all consume news and information through the internet. For example New York Times is a big media outlet which has it’s own media outlet website where daily users come and consume daily news. There are also some people who are just blogging and creating content to share, this comes under the blogs website.

Blog/Media Outlet Website

How to design a Blog/Media Outlet Website?

Follow these points while designing a Blog/Media Outlet Website:

• Content: The way to Design a specific media outlet whether it’s big or small that you still have to focus on the same things and the most important thing is content. Blog/Media Outlet websites have a purpose or goal and their goal is to get the viewers to read something. You must take care of the design principles like Typography, Repetition, Alignment, etc. Make sure that the text doesn’t look boring and for that you can also add some visuals but not many since these companies have limited pictures of the news.
• Imagery: Imagery is a crucial part of any blog. For a media outlet website, we might to be able to add many images as we wish, but for blog website, Imagery grabs viewers attention. Make sure to add relevant pictures and have visual hierarchy in the visuals that you are adding.

Educational Websites:

Educational website is where you are at right now. GeeksforGeeks is an educational website. Educational websites provides education content to the users, be it education course, articles, quiz, tips and tricks, etc. These types of website are focused on teaching people a specific skill, subject or a topic.

Educational Websites

How to design a Educational Websites?

Follow these points while designing an Educational Website:

• Engagement: The problem with most of Educational websites and the courses they offer is that the people are very excited at the beginning but then are likely to get bored because attention spans are becoming very short in this digital age. In order to ensure the success of the website, one must make sure that the UI/UX of the website is engaging. For that we can do multiple things:
  • Add visual elements to the website.
  • Use brighter colors and modern typography.
  • Use images and videos wherever possible.
  • Add features like quiz, fun games, and assessment for drive engagement.
• Visuals and text: The learning in the educational websites happens with text and visuals so it must be paid a lot of attention by the designers. Make sure that the text and the visuals follow a hierarchy where the important text is given a larger font and higher font weight than the normal text. You can also create this hierarchy by color contrasts and spacings.

Portfolio Websites:

Portfolio websites or a personal website are basically subset of the business websites but the difference between them is that Portfolio websites are for People and Professionals while Business websites are for Companies. Portfolio websites are used by Professionals to showcase their work, connect with people and get more opportunities in their fields.

Portfolio Websites

How to design a Portfolio Websites?

• Content Direction: In Portfolio websites, you can not just paste your work out there. You need to find a way to visually present it in a meaningful way. If you are a designer, your work might be visual but if you are a developer or a writer, you need to find a way to present your work in a visual way because at the end of the day your visitors will be consuming the content visually. Therefore pay attention to the visual art and content direction of the work you have done in the past.
• Personality: Use your portfolio website to show who you are and what is your personality. With Personal website, what we want to show is our personality, who we are as people and what is our story. While designing your Portfolio, make sure to be authentic and show your real self in your portfolio.

Conclusion

In this article we discussed the 5 types of websites which are – E-commerce Website, Marketing and Business Website, Blog/Media Outlet Website, Educational Websites, Portfolio Website. Now almost all the website can be brough under one or more than one of these types. Every website is different and must be designed according to the needs of that particular website. Make sure to follow the points we discussed in the article when you design your next professional looking website.