Types of Web Sites

A description of the different classifications of web sites and their purposes.

Commercial Sites

These are pages where transactions take place and a product is actually bought or sold - like books or airline tickets. Even though these sites are in the business of making money by acquiring customers, people tend to overestimate the profit potential of these web sites simply because they do so much volume in sales, but many times have a hard time turning a profit. Couple that with the fact that they are also much higher-risk sites, because of the larger marketing and coding costs involved, the risk/reward ratio becomes somewhat unattractive. Examples include dell.com and expedia.com.

Application Sites

These are web sites where the web site performs a function for the user, like searching for information, games, or mortgage calculators. This area tends to be dominated by large, capital-rich sites which need to pay coders to create pages with advanced code. Examples include mapquest.com, bodogpoker.com, or Babelfish translator. Within this category I place the informational aggregator sites like pricegrabber.com, moviefone.com, and insurancepricequote.com because they are not publishing information like a pure information site is - they are creating an application that lets users compare information.

Community Sites

These are forum sites where users sign up to talk about the subject matter and possibly create bonds with other users where a community is formed. On these sites the content is less important (many times there isn't any at all) than the participation of community members fostered by a sense of belonging. These are getting more popular because of the free forum software out there as well as the fact that once a forum site gets popular the webmaster can have a high-traffic site with very little effort.

Informational Sites - Dynamic

These are sites where the information is updated continually.

News sites - These are mainly national newspapers and magazines that provide current news coverage. They tend to have a high level of new content on a daily basis.
Article sites - These sites offer different articles on a particular subject matter. These tend to be lower-volume sites than news sites where articles are created every couple of days or couple of weeks. They could be larger sites like salon.com or a small or medium-sized site that is in a niche market.

Informational Sites - Static

These are sites where the information doesn't change much.

Brochure sites - These are usually home pages of small businesses that typically provide information about the company and its products or services, but do not try to sell anything. They communicate the same types of information as brochures while having the same layout and look and feel. These sites tend to be static web pages without dynamic content or user interaction. If these are personal businesses (like a doctor or lawyer) then they may tend to be more like a personal site.
Reference sites - These are pages with tons of static content on a particular subject. They tend act like online libraries with a storehouse of information that can have a lot of value because a large number of pages can make a site worth coming back to often. A site like this requires clear organization and easy browsing or a good search feature. These sites are hard to create successfully simply because of the volume of information required. An example of this type of site would be baseball-reference.com or m-w.com.
Links/Portal sites - Since the web is so big and decentralized, people need ways to find what is out there. Therefore, some web pages specialize in providing links to other pages. These sites are worth returning to if they are comprehensive and up-to-date. These sites are technically easier to make but such a site requires frequent updating so a lot of time would be involved. Automation would help a lot.

Personal Sites

Home Pages - These sites are maintained by individuals. Many times they tend to be lower quality because there isn't a big need to create a good impression. If they are official home pages of famous people then the quality will be higher. The sites tend to have very few pages, most of the time from 1-5 static pages.
Blogs - Blogs tend to be simpler projects - the marketing is usually minimal, the backend is automated and standardized so there is less coding to do, and the content tends to be narrower. These are getting much more popular due to the free blogging software out there. They tend to have all updated content and no static content - the opposite of a traditional personal home page.

Conclusion

Some sites have different functions that apply to different categories. For example, there may be information sites that have a forum section. There may be other sites which have a function with falls into more than one category. For example, expedia.com is both a commercial (e-commerce) site and an information aggregator.