Websites these days has become an important part of our life. Whether we have to do the shopping for a dress or we want to eat food from a restaurant of our choice at home, Or want groceries home delivered most of the times we use websites and their apps. But before, we go deeper let’s know something about the website.
A website is a collection of related web pages. You might be wondering now what is a web page? A web page is a simple document that can be displayed on a web browser. One can design and develop a website of his /her choice by coding HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP etc. If you cannot code, there are several website builders in the market like Wix, Squarespace, Weebly and so on. Even you may have also come across their ads while surfing the internet. It is totally up to you to learn web design and development languages and then build a website or to go with website builders that I have mentioned above.
I am putting several points that show websites are making the world a better place, but also like a coin that has two sides, websites also have two faces i.e. its pros and cons. we will see the pros and cons of most of the websites one after another:
1. Impact of social media websites in our lives:
Websites especially social media websites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Etc made people connected across the globe. People can connect with their known ones, share their ideas, follow their interests and find like-minded people in the online world and do many more things. As of October 2019, there are a total of 3.725 billion active social media users. This shows that social media has become part of many people lives. Let’s talk about the pros and cons of social media.
Pros:
- Larger audience reaches: In the context of business if you want to promote your product or services or simply want to create brand awareness among many people then social media can help you to do that. You can also view analytics for the same and track your performance. one can connect with the audience directly and can gain valuable feedback for their products or services.
- Free to use: The best part about social media sites is that it is free to use i.e. no signup charges you can easily create an account and start using the platform.
- Brand Building: One can post as many as content without any cost when seen by the people on social media expose the brands to those people. This ultimately helps in brand building.
Cons:
- Fake News: Just like forest fire spreads rapidly in the whole forest likewise Fake news on social media spreads rapidly among many people. In some cases, fake news does not cause too much problem for us but in some cases it does.
- Addiction: usually teenagers get addicted to it, they start spending more and more time using social media resulting in degradation in their performance at work.
- Fraud and scams: Some people with an evil mindset uses social media as a platform to commit fraud and scams against innocent people.
2. E-commerce websites:
These days eCommerce sites are very helpful to people. From groceries to electronics items everything can be delivered to the doorstep. You just have to log on to their websites or use their Android/IOS App to order stuff. In India, most popular eCommerce brands are Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal. If you live in India there is also a chance that you may have come across the Television commercial Ads of the eCommerce companies that I have listed above. Time to see the merits and demerits of eCommerce sites.
Pros:
- High chance of conversion: In an offline store, shopkeepers provide you with a limited number of details about the product on the other hand, on eCommerce sites you can view all details about the product, you can post a question and get their answers, view video demo and so on. This increases the chance of conversions.
- 24/7 sale: In an offline store there is a time limit i.e. from 9 am to 9 pm just an example, but products listed on websites can be ordered 24/7 just you have to automate the system of the site so that customers that place their orders get quickly notified about the purchase of the items.
- Sell the product on an international level: Websites are visible to the whole world no matter whether you live in India or America or any other country you can access the website easily. Just you have to learn about the market where you are selling the product and have to remove any barrier that is coming in between your eCommerce business.
Cons:
- Sale losses during site crash: If the server of the eCommerce site starts receiving more traffic than its handling capacities then the website will crash and no longer will be visible to other people which ultimately results in sale losses.
- Cannot try things: Since you are visiting the site and ordering products by looking at several factors like images, videos, ratings, Etc of the products which may cause a loss in satisfaction because you cannot try it before you are ordering it.
- Higher Cost: Apart from the simple website, e-commerce site development charges are also high and also requires costly android /ios Apps. Since as per Statista there are 469.3 million mobile internet users in India in 2021 this is enough to tell the importance of an app.
3. Blogs website:
If you love writing then this type of website is for you. A blog website is a website where you can share your views about some particular specific topic. If you want to write a blog then you have to purchase the domain name and web hosting. The name of the website is nothing but a domain name. The place where a website is stored in the hosting. But if you want a free blog website then you can get one by using google’s blogger or by using wordpress.com’s Free plan. Taking about the pros and cons:
Pros:
- Express your thoughts: Blogs are a great way to put one’s thought in front of the world. People can choose from millions of blogs to read for their interest in a particular topic.
- Easy to write a post: One can use google’s blogger platform or can choose the WordPress platform for their blogs. They provide easy tools from writing the post to update and deleting posts.
- Comments: People can leave comments in the blog, which in turns enables users to interact with the blog’s author.
Cons:
- Time consuming: Writing a blog is a time consuming process and to maintain a blog requires consistent efforts.
- Not getting enough views: It’s not that easy task to have and maintain a blog, you have to learn other stuffs as well like SEO( Search Engine Optimisation ),keyword research and so on. If you don’t know these things your blog might not get enough views. This ultimately generates less revenue or no revenue for you.
- Negative Comments: Hate words , negative comments can disturb your mental and emotional wellbeing.
There are other types of websites as well but we will see them in future posts. For this post, I think this is enough. Let me know what you think about websites, leave a comment. Thank you for your time.
Featured Image Credit : Edited from House vector created by stories – www.freepik.com
