Website Types From Basic Brochures to Complex Full Featured Internet Presence Sites
A Basic Site Can Be Expanded Later According to Your Needs and Skill Level
If you are a first time website creator you may be puzzled about the different website types and their features. Below is a Q and A guide to explain the types and some of the website terminology.
Website Types Q and A
Q. What are the basic website types in terms of difficulty and complexity?
A. Website types for first time web creators or for advanced pros start with a basic site and become more complex and far reaching in their internet presence.
- Brochure Websites Have the Following Characteristics:
- Static, meaning they stay the same and do not need updating
- Quicker and easier to create
- Less expensive
- Often used for small businesses
- Lack the abilities to reach and keep visitors that a full featured site will have
Brochure Sites – These are often a traditional looking static website look with only a few pages. A typical brochure site might have a row of three to five items in a menu across the top. For example the menu labels might include Home, Products or Services, FAQs, About and Contact.
Small local businesses might have a Brochure Website and list it with Google Places for their town. This way their website and location shows up when someone searches for a keyword phrase including their town name and their type of product or service. A red balloon on a Google Map on the front page of the search results shows where the business is located.
These Brochure Websites can work well for a small business owner who wants to set up a basic site and then forget about it. They are called “Static Websites” because they stay the same. Since there is no blog with articles being added there is little maintenance.
The sites do not have much opportunity for search engine optimization other than using Google Places. Since new content is not being added there is not enough content to do content marketing or social media marketing.
But for someone who wants to put in only a small amount of time building an easy site this can be a solution.
The site can be expanded and customized later as desired. A blog can be added. The basic WordPress Brochure Type Website can be changed by using the tools in the admin area. If later a complex, full-featured site is needed then this can be built.
Q. What are the more complex, full featured website types?
A. Moving up in complexity and wide ranging internet presence capability from the basic, static brochure site means having more content, search engine optimization, social media marketing, ecommerce and probably more multimedia.
The Full Featured, Complex Website takes more time and work but offers more opportunities for marketing on the internet.
Features May Include the Following:
- Blog
- Multimedia
- Search Engine Optimization
- Social Media Marketing
- Content Marketing
A basic brochure site can easily be altered in the admin area to add a blog. This is a huge step up from the basic brochure. It enables you to keep your visitors on the site longer and to meet their needs with content that helps them and answers questions they may have. The purpose of the blog is provide useful information that adds value to the website and to the visitor’s experience.
The articles on the blog are often referred to as quality content. This is different from advertising copywriting or sales pitches. The quality content does what is says. The first goal is to add quality. There are times when blog articles or posts have sales items or sales pitches as well. But the sales copywriting is different from the quality content writing.
The blog posts with quality content offer useful information such as tips, strategies, steps, explanations how to do something, definitions and so on.
A big advantage of adding a blog to the website is because the blog enables you to do content marketing, social media marketing and search engine optimization. The blog posts can be optimized. This means you use keywords in the blog posts that someone might use to search for the information. Search engines pick up these keywords and index your website and the blog posts according to keywords or keyword phrases. This is part of search engine optimization.
You can also share the content on social media. This creates backlinks to the website and brings visitors. When people see the blog posts with their links to the website on Facebook, Twitter or other social media then may click to visit your site. This is social media marketing.
The more complex websites may have a variety of multimedia in addition to the blog. Content on the pages and the blog posts may have videos, podcasts (audios that you record which play when you click a button), photos, screencast tutorials, ebooks, graphic art and info-graphics.
To create the multimedia you can use a variety of free softwares, free services and paid tools too if you wish. For instance, Camstudio offers a free screen recording software. To make a tutorial you download the Camstudio and then click the Start button when you start the screen recording. You attach a microphone to your computer to record your voice over.
Other free softwares that people use include Picasa for photo editing, Youtube for posting videos, camcorder video editing software that comes with your camcorder, Audacity podcasting (audio only recordings of voice) and Microsoft Word for making pdf ebooks. It does not need to be expensive to create multimedia if you use your own labor and the free softwares and tools.
Q. What are the biggest differences between a Basic Static Website and a Complex Full Featured Website?
The Basic Static Website stays the same, needs little maintenance, is quicker and easier to create and has fewer pages.
The Complex Full-Featured Website can range from simply adding a blog to the Basic Static Website to adding a huge number of useful features that do take time to create and keep up.
The advantage of the Basic Static Website is that its quicker and easier to set up and maintain. The disadvantage is that it has more limitations in terms of search engine optimization and providing visitors with useful content.
The Complex Full Featured Site may cost only a little more if you add a fairly basic blog and just write a new blog post once in a while.
Or you can go all out and add blog posts frequently, use a lot of multimedia and use various types of search engine optimization and marketing.