Where Does Your Website Fit in Your Business Model?

Your business aims and ways of making money will determine the content, structure and design of your website.

Two basic purposes for a website are:

1. Provide services or sell products direct to customers
2. Educate customers and provide them a way to contact you to help them further with their purchase

If you want to sell direct you need a way to present products and allow customers to select what they want to buy, set delivery options and pay for their purchase. What the customer does is browse through pages until they find what they want to buy. For example, an online store has catalogue pages that customers can look through. When the customer wants to buy, he or she clicks on the product and enters a delivery address and payment details to complete the purchase.

Teaching or educating customers means you must provide insightful and helpful articles that show how your products or services make your customers situation better than it would be otherwise. For example, our website publishes articles that show how your own website can improve your business.

Hopefully this short article can help you refine and focus the purpose of your website so you are more clear about what results you want to achieve.