Websites are the living, breathing aspects of the web. If not for websites, people would be searching the internet using Command Prompt-like windows; just black screens with text, like when personal computers were created. Fortunately for us, information technology and web content development have advanced enough for people to not only search the internet through search engines, but they also interact with dynamic, exciting web page content.
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This website content also differs in intent. Some websites showcase people’s digital work like Behance, which showcases digital art, or Clippings.me which showcases people’s writing portfolios. People can only view the portfolio pieces showcased, without changing them. But there are collaborative platforms as well on the internet which exist for multiple people to edit the same documents.
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The type of websites that people could want vary. Although Paradox Media’s specialty is business websites, there are, in fact around 15 different types of website which exist on the internet currently. If you have ever had an interest in having a custom website of your own, it’s good to know the web development options that are out there.
15 Types of Website Available on the Internet
1. Portfolio Website
2. Personal Website
3. Infopreneur Site
4. Blog Site
5. Business Websites
6. Cloud-Based Platforms (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS)
7. eCommerce
8. Social Media
9. Membership Site
10. Wiki or Community Forum
11. Magazine & News Media
12. Video Streaming
13. Music Streaming
14. Web Portals
15. Landing Pages
1. Portfolio Websites
Portfolio sites are where people showcase their creative work and where the web design can look and feel exactly like the artist wants it to. Many ready-to-go sites don’t offer much customization such as Behance or DeviantArt which are mostly galleries, or Clippings.me which is a writer portfolio platform. But if you create your own site for your portfolio, you can fully customize it. This works well for multi-disciplinary artists. You can have a gallery for your photography or modelling shots, a separate showreel section for your acting, and if you do podcasts etc., you can embed that as well.
2. Personal Websites
Personal websites are like portfolio sites in that they can showcase your work but they differ in one respect: a personal website is to sell you as a brand. You brand yourself and allow people to access the many places your personal brand exists, all on one interface. So, your entire social media presence will be fed into your site, through plugins. A personal website is fully customizable, meaning you can change it whenever you want.
3. Infopreneur Sites
Infopreneurs sell information on their private websites. They are usually people who have some sort of advanced skill or expertise in a given industry or with regards to a niche. Their websites usually have strong call to actions (CTAs) and they usually want people to subscribe to newsletters, touting their information products. Their information products can be the newsletters themselves (more in-depth newsletters than the free ones), audio books, access to videos etc.
4. Blog Sites
Blogs are what most people are commonly told are the most personal type of web product. In fact, blogs can exist on any site, and many business websites have blogs. There are blogging platforms such as WordPress and Tumblr where people can create their custom websites. Tumblr is a micro-blogging site, as is the long-form writing site Medium. WordPress has come to be more of a hosting platform for websites over the years. This means that, although WordPress started by targeting bloggers, other websites now find themselves hosted on their servers. Paradox Media hosts all of our unique web development on WordPress and our web design is fully customizable.
5. Business Websites
Business websites are there to give people information about products, a brand, or services. Business websites have many site pages which give more detail as to the work they do. Most business web design is done by professionals and you’ll find such sites to be fully customized, dynamic, and user-friendly. Web professionals focus on aspects such as user experience, search engine optimization (SEO), and other factors which make a business website successful. These factors regard how people interact with the business website, and whether the business marketing efforts are working.
6. Cloud-Based Platforms (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS)
Cloud-based platforms are either Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Each of these three are cloud service offerings but they fulfil different needs. SaaS is on-demand access to ready-to-use, cloud-hosted application software like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. PaaS is access to ready-to-use, cloud-hosted platforms for developing, running, and managing your own applications. PaaS allows you to build your own application ecosystem like a content management system (CMS), or the SaaS examples mentioned above. And then finally, IaaS allows you to access cloud-hosted servers, storage and networking, and IT infrastructure for your business. Most businesses usually work with SaaS or PaaS. IaaS is usually needed if you host other people’s websites or you operate an IT company where you manage web servers en-masse.
7. eCommerce Sites
An eCommerce website is where people buy products such as Amazon, Etsy or eBay. There are many eCommerce websites on the internet that are not as big as those three. Any business that sells products can set up their own customizable, private website to work as an eCommerce website. ECommerce infrastructure for a specific website is offered by companies such as Shopify or WooCommerce. The latter is a customizable, open-source eCommerce platform built on WordPress. If you have an eCommerce site and wonder about the type of options available to you, try Paradox Media’s web development team.
8. Social Media
Social media has been the cool kid of the web for quite some time now. From its earliest iteration with Myspace, and Myspace contemporaries like Facebook, it has thrived over the years such that social media websites have millions of daily visitors. For many people, social media IS the internet, but for denizens of the web, it’s actually just a small part of it: a few core websites with millions of visitors but not representing the plenitude that is on the internet. Most people use social media sites in their digital marketing strategy, but very few people try and build their own social media sites. The existing sites are simply too big, and they have too much market share.
9. Membership Websites
Membership websites make you sign up for a subscription to access products, services, or information. Some of the most well-known membership sites are those used in academic research such as JSTOR, where people can access hundreds of academic journals. There are also membership sites that allow you to access certain SaaS tools such as ClearScope, AHREFS etc.
10. Wiki or Community Forum
The most well-known wiki website is Wikipedia and then more niche wikis which exist. Fandoms of specific TV shows, movies, comics, games, and manga have fandom wikis related to nearly everything about a specific subject. For instance, a wiki about a TV show can have an entire wiki entry dedicated to one character, their character journey and evolution on-screen, if the actor was paying homage to other actors which played the character before etc. Community forums are spaces such as Reddit where people follow forum threads discussing different subjects. People can ask questions, have them answered, and simply interact with each other depending on the community guidelines.
11. Magazine and News Media
Magazine and news media websites are professional websites which report on politics, the economy, and other newsworthy events around the world. Most news websites will be constructed in such a way that they report on local news and global news. They may also allow for comments on their articles and encourage readers to share content with social media buttons.
12. Video Streaming
Video streaming websites are concentrated on video content only. Nowadays, video content is available on many social media apps, and apps such as TikTok are video-based. YouTube still remains the number one free video streaming service that allows for people to upload videos and share them. Other streaming platforms such as Disney+ or Netflix are not as open as YouTube. This is because they create their own content and have to protect their intellectual property. Also, these sites allow you to access the videos through membership only, via a monthly subscription.
13. Music Streaming
Music streaming websites are similar to video streaming websites with the only difference between them being that music streaming sites deal with audio content, not video content. This means that you can find music singles, albums, EPs, and podcasts on music streaming websites. The two most famous sites for music streaming are iTunes and Spotify.
14. Web Portals (Search Hundreds of Related Databases)
A web portal has to be specially built for larger organizations in order to handle large loads of information simultaneously. A web portal is not a search engine because it is usually software that searches databases instead of web pages. For instance, the DMV database contains all of the drivers’ information in the US, including different states and jurisdictions. When a DMV employee checks the database, no matter which US state you’re in, they can see all of your DMV information in one go. How the employee accesses the information is the web portal, the information accessed is from a database.
15. Landing Pages
Many websites no longer work with landing pages because they offer a very bad user experience. Users of your website will land on the page and then have a call to action (CTA) instruct them on what to do. However, many users are not using the internet in that manner. A landing page is akin to a poster: it cannot be interacted with and people do not learn a great deal about you and your business from a landing page.
Our opinion as Paradox Media: current best practices suggest avoiding landing pages at all costs. Try and have a website which helps users and which enriches the user experience or meets the criteria of the user search. In this way, Google does not mark you very low in the SERPs, because the search engine recognizes the most important thing is that you are fulfilling the search intent.
All these different websites require web designers who know what they are doing from the very first step to the last. Web developers have to have a series of skills under their belt in order to produce responsive, dynamic, and incredibly intuitive websites. So, what are the types of skills needed in web-development?
Types of Web Development Skills Needed to Build Great Websites
Front-End Web Development
Front-end web development refers to the client-side, look and feel of a website, also known as the user interface. The web designer who deals with front-end development will also have to deal with the user experience (UX) aspects. They will mainly be focused on how users navigate the various site pages; whether the website is optimized for search engines (SEO); and whether the website does what it’s supposed to do.Â
If a website is selling a product, for instance, a relevant question for the latter would be: can someone choose an item, add it to their cart, and checkout with their credit or debit card? If the website cannot do this, then it is not fulfilling its purpose.
Also, although it is not back-end development, the front-end dev will need to understand HTML markup, CSS, and JavaScript. HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language and it is the language used to code a web page. From section breaks, to whether stuff should be in columns etc., HTML makes leeway for those features. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, and it’s the décor or window-dressing to HTML. It adds typography, colors, and layouts to a website. True interactivity comes with the last scripting language JavaScript. JavaScript works directly with browsers to read website details quickly. The front-end developer needs to have all these various concepts in mind when building a website, so that it matches the standard of other websites users visit.
Is there a difference between Java and JavaScript?
Key differences between Java and JavaScript: Java is an Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) programming language while Java Script is an OOP scripting language. Java creates applications that run in a virtual machine or browser while JavaScript code is run on a web browser only. Java code needs to be compiled while JavaScript code are all in text.
Back-End Web Development
Back-end web developers work on the servers of the website and also make sure that the site architecture makes sense. Many back-end developers work with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). APIs are a means for two or more computers to communicate with each other. Often, APIs allow users to send requests to a computer program or database and get back a response. The back-end dev will need to know back-end languages such as Ruby, PHP, Java, .Net, or Python.
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WordPress, the chosen website host of all Paradox Media web development runs on PHP in the back-end. PHP is a server-side scripting language that allows for easy creation of fully functional web applications. So, PHP creates the infrastructure – the concrete and walls – and HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are the paint adorning the walls, the furniture, etc.
Full-Stack Website Development
 Full-stack web development is where everything comes together. Full-stack developers work with all the front-end and back-end web design by themselves. They know all of the front-end markup languages but also the back-end programming languages as well.
Mobile Development
 A mobile developer is primarily someone who develops mobile apps. In the beginning of mobile development, the ecosystem of the mobile app was usually removed from that of the website. However, with the advent of omnichannel web development and responsive site design, mobile sites now match desktop sites.
The only difference with a mobile app versus its desktop counterpart, is that the navigation is different and the mobile experience may include content which is exclusive to mobile-only. This exclusive content is to get more people to adopt the mobile app. Many brands go the way of mobile-only content with offers such as coupons etc. for meals or discounts on gadgets or appliances. So, for instance, a shop selling groceries will advertise some groceries as discounted, only if you present the QR code given to you on the mobile app.
Security Development
Security development is mainly used in industries where high-security data is being sent and received. The security developer will often play the role of an ethical hacker and ascertain whether the checks and balances of that site are up to par. It goes beyond monitoring whether a site is virus-free and whether their credit/debit card checkout process is encrypted. Security developers also check whether an entire site could be susceptible to ransomware and other high-level hacking. This is mostly for sites that deal with incredible amounts of money such as federal and private banks, the IRS, or charities/non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as The World Bank or UNICEF.
Enquire About Your Custom WordPress Website Now
Now that you know the types of website available to you, which can be customized to your exact needs; and the ways in which these websites are constructed, you should be better equipped to build your site. Paradox Media specializes in the creation of dynamic, user-friendly, intuitive and incredibly functional custom WordPress websites. Contact us for a free website audit where we can tell you exactly where on your website you can make improvements, or if you don’t have a site at all, how we help you create one.
The web design journey need not be arduous or time-intensive. Leave it to our expert team to help you from the ground up, starting with your site architecture, to things as small as your call to action (CTA) buttons or contact forms. We can help you.
