Websites (outside of budget considerations) have different features that define the way people talk about and use them.  Here are some popular examples. (Remember that you can also make a hybrid of the these):

Basic site (personal or business) with a blog – the majority of all websites on line are in this category. They can look beautiful and contain thousands of post and pages,  forums,  pictures.. By allowing comments, rating and social interaction like bookmarking,  they are are interactive or alive  in a basic way.

Basic e-Commerce website or small store – SSL  (Secured Socket Layer Encryption)  Store used to sell products… shopping carts and user accounts are the dominant features here: this kind of website is useful for selling a clearly defined, well-understood commodity or a service where the definition and branding is clear-cut enough for a purchasing decision to be made without interaction with a human being.  It is critical here (and often not the case!) that inventory is setup with site architecture where products, specifications, brand names and features are accessible to the search engines’ robots so that the site will get traffic from organic search terms (key words searches on Google, Yahoo, Bing and others)  The paradox between security and accessibility must be addressed properly in order to gain traffic safely.

Community site or social network – Profiles, friends, messaging, groups, activity feeds..this type of site seeks to create a community of users: often the revenue model is simply to sell advertising to reach those users, where  the actual purpose of the site is simply to serve the users themselves in some way.  Such sites, if successful, can be sold for ridiculously large amounts of money to larger companies which can cash flow this access to the users for advertising purposes.

CRM  (Customer Relation Management) and Intranets – Managing customer accounts internally, sharing private data amongst company personnel, time line, project info, work flows…these are secure sites used for internal purposes, and may also have public versions of the site.   There may be internal functions that are protected areas used, for instance, to gather from and/or disseminate sensitive and /or timely  information to employees or non-profit or government association members or political workers.

Web application service providers – Provides software as a service– unlimited– these  usually offer a unique service (example:  Meetup.com) where the software itself, and perhaps access to the other users, are the product or service to be sold, and/or given away at least initially: often a free trial leads to a paid upgrade or a voluntary donation or sponsorship.

Market Site- Connects buyers and sellers  together ( think e-Lance, dating sites… auction sites like eBay.com)  Common features include advanced searches, profiles, matching, and the facilitation of selling, purchasing, researching or trading of some kind.

(See hybrid example here)

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