Web sites roughly divide into these categories:
- Personal - sites mostly about the people who create them, including hobbies, family members, poetry or photography, and favorite links.
- Brochures - sites that tell all about a businesses or organization's benefits and features, including contact, service, product and ordering information.
- Communication - these sites include bulletin boards, chat rooms, etc.
- E-commerce - sites that have products to sell including retailers, auctions, wholesalers, etc.
- Entertainment - sites whose main objective is to entertain you, including adult content web sites.
- Information - sites about a particular subject, offering lots of information and links to other sites.Wikipedia is an excellent example of an information website.
- Portals - sites whose primary function is to link you to other sites. This generally includes search engines and directories. Portals such as Excite often offer news services and other features that you can personalize, such as the scores of your favorite sports team, or stock prices.
If you are planning on having products to sell, then you need to look for Web Hosting Services with e-commerce options such as large server space, shopping carts and other special programming capabilities, as well as merchant accounts for processing credit card payments.
Information sites are usually less complex and do not require e-commerce options or large amounts of server space. Some very large information sites will use databases and .php (all purpose server side scripting program), .asp (Active Server Pages - used on Miscrosoft servers) or .jsp (Java Server Pages - used on UNIX servers) to help deliver vast amounts of information. Java and JavaScript are client side programming languages that can be used to implement more complex features or graphical presentations.
Here are some great reports on setting up and promoting a web site.