What Is The Purpose of a Website? 4 Common Reasons

In today’s world of online sales and marketing, nothing is more important than a website that effectively accomplishes what you want it to do. A website can perform many roles and functions for your business. In this article, we are going to address the four main purposes of websites and show you how to develop a website purpose statement.

Website Purpose Statement

Before you begin designing or redesigning your website, take a moment to stop and consider the goals you want to accomplish with your new website. This can be complicated as you consider the role you want your website to play. However, drafting a website purpose statement is essential to creating a website with clarity and conciseness. This should outline the objectives and tasks that your new website will accomplish for you. Ask yourself questions like these, “Do I want to generate more leads so that I can close deals quickly when potential clients call or inquire?” “Do I want my website to be an online store that ships directly from the website and connects with other services such as Shipstation?” Is the purpose of my site to educate visitors?”

As you begin writing down the new website’s functions and purpose, consider that although your website may have more than one purpose, it does need to have a main purpose, and that main purpose should be articulated clearly on the Home page. One of the primary steps we take with our new clients at Distillery Creative is to help them distill their website’s message and define the clear actions they want their customers to take on their website. So often users bounce off of a website or click away because the main message is not clear. We want to make the purpose of your website clear for your potential customers. Here are some purposes your website might fulfill. Choose the most important one for your business and then go about integrating others once the main purpose is clear.

E-Commerce

If you sell a product, whether it’s a physical item or perhaps online education, an online store may be the right call for you. The main purpose of an E-Commerce website is to motivate users to click to purchase immediately. All of the imagery, text, and calls to action should be product-based. Your buttons might say things like, “Shop Now”, “Buy Now,” “See All Items,” or “Add to Cart.” The goal of E-commerce sites is immediate conversion. An example of an E-commerce site is our client, Christine Olmstead. She’s a fine artist and art educator who runs a course website christineolmsteadlearn.com. On this website, users are encouraged to purchase an online course. One of the other purposes of this site is Lead-Generation, but we will go over that in point #4.

Education

The purpose of an education website is to teach your user something so that they can understand and utilize your services better. If you don’t or can’t sell your services online the purpose of an education-focused site is to highlight the special and unique way you serve people by teaching them about your work.
A perfect example of an education website is one designed for a doctor’s office or a hospital. While many healthcare services must be accessed in person, these sites can be great resources for individuals interested in learning more about their health. Doctors can use this opportunity to teach their patients about the specialties that make their practice exceptional. One of our clients, Olympic Internal Medicine, educates their clients with their outstanding “Resources”’ page, which is a bookmarked page that their patients return to over and over for more information and help. By educating customers and potential clients with important medical knowledge, Olympic Internal Medicine becomes a resource people can trust and thus the website converts more patients for the practice.

Reputation Building

All websites should build a good and trustworthy reputation for the service or product provider, but, unless you are selling a very specific and individual product, reputation building isn’t usually the #1 goal. Reputation building websites are great for public figures, public speakers, or those involved in coaching. Reputation building websites are selling trust in the individual because they are providing services based on who they are as a person.
The website we produced for Kathleen Parker is a wonderful example of a reputation building site. This website is a “virtual business card.” Kathleen is an internationally renowned journalist and author. People read her work for her excellent content and high-quality opinions. She is selling her thoughts. The purpose of this website is to highlight her expertise and subject knowledge as a credible source.

Lead Generation

The fourth website purpose that we’ll discuss in this post is lead generation. The purpose of lead generating websites is to move customers to contact the business or purchase right on the website. If you provide an in-person service like an electrician or roofing contractor, the main purpose of your website may be to generate leads. The lead generation purpose is usually coupled with a reputation building site, showing that your business is trustworthy in your field; however, the main purpose is usually to generate leads. Calls to action for these websites might be prompts like “Call Now”, “View our Google Review” “See us on Yelp” “Get a Free Estimate,” and more. The home page of lead-generation websites is designed to get people to take an immediate action of calling, emailing, or starting services now! Pleasant Grove Self Storage is one of our clients that has a phenomenal lead generation website that converts new customers consistently. The landing page of this site outlines exactly what a customer can get and gives them many options to call to rent their storage space today.

These are just a few of the main purposes of websites. As we’ve illustrated in this post, these purposes blend and go hand in hand. However, when designing and writing the content for your website, one of these website purposes should be the CLEAR focus. To distill your message down to the most important thing and help your customers take clear action, picking one of these as your priority is key.

At Distillery Creative we work with our customers to refine their website’s purpose and to create content that accomplishes their business objectives. Contact us or call us today to discuss how we might help you.