How to choose the type of website for your business?
The coronavirus pandemic, which swept the entire world at the beginning of 2020, made it clear that our lives will never be the same again, and now most of it will take place online. To survive the crisis and even increase your sales, you will need to establish remote communication with clients through social networks, instant messengers and your website.
Promotion in search engines, YouTube and social networks will give you traffic (visitors), and the site will convert their interest into orders that will bring you money.
Yes, the pandemic will pass, but people’s habits, incl. Your customers will remain because a new habit is formed in just 21 days and becomes part of the behavior.
What to do if you don’t have your own website yet or if your current website doesn’t solve business problems well? The first answer to this question that comes to mind is not to bother, but to quickly find a ready-made solution using a template or create a website using a website builder.
The better - a unique website rather than a ready-made solution?
First you need to decide what type of site will optimally solve your problems. How correctly you determine the type of your Internet resource and who you trust to create it, The success of your online business will largely depend. Specialists from a good web studio will suggest the optimal type of site, but if you want to figure it out yourself, consider:
Main types of sites with examples from our work and popular Internet resources
If you need to present you or your company online, and you do not set the site the task of selling online, but want to receive applications from potential clients/partners or attract clients offline:
If you want to sell, this is for you:
Provide assistance in searching, share information, or solve a problem in real time:
This is not a complete list of all possible types of Internet resources; their boundaries are blurred and therefore cannot be clearly classified. But we will try to clarify this topic for you.
Business card website - “the beginning of the beginning”
This is the basis for building your own business website. It is designed to clearly convey the most important information about the company, its products and/or services, and contains all contact information. Sometimes it is difficult to find the line between business cards and landing pages, because the former are often represented by one-page sites. And often, such an online resource consists of about 1-5 pages.
As an interesting example, let’s look at a universal one-page business card we created for a network of shopping and entertainment complexes (TRK). Thanks to the convenient admin panel implemented in this project, the client was able to simply and clearly fill the page of each of the shopping malls in their network with content:Shopping and entertainment complex "Victory Plaza", Shopping and entertainment complex "Prospect", TRC "Zirka".
If you are planning to expand your business and already see what it will be like in 3-5 years, we strongly recommend that you take the creation of your first website responsibly. Your business card will become the basis for building a large-scale Internet project if the developer takes into account the prospects for business development and provides for the scalability of the resource both in functionality and in traffic by selecting the right CMS.
So, for example, the above-described universal one-page website for the shopping mall network, developed on MODX, supports the possibility of further scaling the functionality - creating sections with goods / showcases of individual tenants, which can be useful during the next “quarantine”.
A corporate website is an image component of a serious business
A corporate (official) website is an expanded version of a business card, designed at an advanced level. In addition to the main areas of activity, here you can learn about the corporate values, mission and philosophy of the company. News, press releases, information about TOP management and vacancies are also posted here. Often, such Internet resources have a closed part, accessible only to employees.
Examples of such official Internet resources: PJSC "ArcelorMittal Krivy Rig" и METINVEST. These sites also have a product catalog. The first one is for information only, the second one allows you to place a quick order. But there is no possibility of fully placing an order (with a shopping cart and checkout). The specific nature of sales of such enterprises implies the conclusion of a supply contract, so the conversion action of a potential buyer is not an order, but an application.
Another example is a brand Lacoste, who began working with his retail, transforming a corporate website with a catalog into a full-fledged online store. One of our most interesting projects followed the same path. Zlatamebel, which has evolved from a corporate website with a catalog of a premium brand of upholstered furniture into an online store of premium products, successfully sells large amounts and increases its efficiency every year.
At first, the client simply did not believe that people would buy online such an expensive product, which historically was sold through retail (offline), because it required tactile contact - “You need to sit on the sofa to understand.” But after deeply studying behavioral scenarios and building ideal usability for this product and target audience, we managed to launch online sales of this premium brand.
After adding complex custom configurator functionality, this site successfully sells furniture products with a receipt of up to $13,5 thousand online!
Landing Page
Landing Page is a one-page website, also called a capture page or landing page.
To quickly sell a small range of goods and services with maximum conversion, you will need a landing page - a landing page on which LEADS from your sales funnel will land. The main tasks of this page:
- keep the visitor's attention;
- make you read to the end;
- SELL!
The main tools for performing these functions are a correctly composed “powerful offer” based on a unique selling proposition (USP), selling UX/UI design and text written taking into account the behavioral characteristics of the target audience.
A sales page is suitable if your assortment ranges from 1 to 8-10 items of one category of goods and/or services. For example, a barbershop landing page Mr.Shakh offers 6 hairdressing services. We found the optimal, laconic solution to this business problem, selling services without unnecessary words, using only 4 screens. This one-page site is also an image-based business card site for a barbershop with an emphasis on the barber’s personal brand.
Experts believe that the maximum number of positions for effectively using the selling properties of a landing page is up to 15. Then its effectiveness rapidly decreases. But in some cases there may be more (up to 60 positions).
For this, the concept of Multi Landing can be used - a dynamic landing page, the content of which adapts to user requests. This can be clearly seen in the example of the website we created for a new Ukrainian brand of bed linen and home textiles Utorova. We have developed a non-standard solution to place a description of a critically large number of products (about 60 items) along with related information and organize their distribution on one sales page. It is promoted through contextual advertising. We show the page that is relevant to search queries.
So, depending on the request, by clicking on the link in the advertisement, he will see a page tailored to the content. For example, for the following queries:
Here, underwear sets differ in purpose, type of material and the presence of a discount, which is realized through filters. General information about the brand, main offer, sizing chart, ordering and delivery conditions remain unchanged.
Single page sites (landing pages) usually have a limited lifecycle. They are created for a specific advertising campaign, promotion, have a temporary offer for the sale of goods and services, and are promoted using contextual and targeted advertising. They are often used at the first stage of launching online sales to test the offer, demand and niche, and after a successful launch, the launch of a full-fledged online store follows. And yet, for sales of the 1st offer, represented by 1 product or a small assortment of goods of the same category, they can be effective in the long term.
Search engines are very distrustful of one-page websites, so SEO promotion of landing pages is a rather complex and ineffective process. But it’s more realistic to promote multilanding in this way, but only in niches with low competition. And yet, for an assortment exceeding 15 items, it is recommended to develop an online store (IM).
E-commerce
Online stores can have an assortment from several dozen items to more than hundreds of thousands. For example, our case is an online store of upholstered furniture in the mid-price segment "dommino". This platform supports scaling to more than tens of thousands of product items, as it is developed on the Magento CMS. The niche of upholstered furniture, which is non-standard for online trading, has already become our favorite. Despite all the difficulties, we successfully sell furniture products online with a receipt above average (more than 30 thousand UAH) - "Eurosofa", "dommino", and even Premium products are more expensive than 250 thousand UAH - Zlatamebel.
Marketplace: what is the difference with an online store?
A marketplace is an online e-commerce (electronic commerce) platform, an online store that provides information about the products/services of its participants, the transactions of which are processed by the marketplace or by themselves.
Over time, online stores of one brand or reseller, already collecting more traffic, can switch to the marketplace format, and in addition to the products of the main brand, products from other suppliers and manufacturers will appear on its windows. However, the development, development and promotion of a marketplace requires a higher level of investment. Examples of Marketplace: the most popular platform in Ukraine "Rosette™", the largest in the world Amazon и Alibaba.
For an ordinary buyer, the difference between a marketplace and an online store can be almost invisible. It consists in the fact that online stores (IM) show the visitor their own showcase / assortment, and marketplaces show many showcases or products from different sellers. In fact, IM can also be a marketplace. Also, transformation into a marketplace could be the next stage in the development/scaling of functionality and sales of IM, which has collected a fairly large volume of demand.
Among the marketplaces there are not only stores, but also services, for example, Airbnb. So, of the interesting projects we have developed, a marketplace and at the same time a web service for finding services and part-time work is Mango ― Ukrainian task exchange. We were thinking in which section to place the “Mango” case, in this or in “Services and Portals”, since it contains all the characteristics of both the marketplace and the search service (services).
Web services and information portals
Information portals aggregate, find and provide information upon user request in real time. The most famous examples are Google or Yandex, but they do not solve the visitor’s problem on their own, but only provide an answer to a search query in which they provide links for a solution.
And web services, for example, TripAdvisor or Booking.com, solve the user’s problem in the shortest way, offering specific solutions in the search results. In our practice, we have already developed a number of interesting Web services in the field of searching for services and performers, among them, such as the freelance exchange/search for Mango services, as well as for equipment repair - Repair-24.
Information resources can also include international training platforms - Coursera, Ukrainian ― MiyKlas, which have become especially relevant during the quarantine period. For remote learning, resources are created where pupils or students receive theory, perform practical tasks, and have feedback from teachers. Often there is also a parental control unit. These sites, like others, are built using a modular system.
Summing up
The thing is that there is no clear gradation and one site can either simultaneously belong to several types of sites or transform in the process of development from one type of site to another. The basis is a business card website, which contains the basic data that is needed on any website. The main website building modules: business card, catalogue, news/blog, ordering/payment module (cart + checkout), chat/forum, contacts, feedback form, private part (personal account). By adding these modules to the business card we get, for example:
- Business card + catalog = website catalog (showcase).
- Business card + news + closed part (only for employees, internal chat, for example) = corporate website.
- Business card + catalog + simplified order (application form) = corporate with catalog.
- Business card + catalog + ordering and payment module (full cycle of registration: shopping cart and checkout) = online store.
And there are many such options. In essence, the site is a scalable structure both in functionality and in traffic, if developed correctly for the prospect of several years of business development. We often take a 3-year horizon. It is important to correctly lay the first brick in the foundation of your online business so that it does not lose relevance and you do not have to create a new website every time with “0” if the changes are not so significant. Thanks to the fact that we are able to look forward, most of the projects we have developed have been successfully developed over many years and do not lose their relevance both technically and for business development tasks.
Find out more about our approach to development you can here. We are ready to help not only choose the type of website, but also develop it as an ideal tool for solving your business problems on the Internet, taking into account the specifics of your niche. We will maximize your online potential and lay the foundation for future development. Leave a request on our landing page or in the site header and we will contact you.
