1. Entertainment
2. Reference
3. Application

Entertainment

Entertainment sites encompass not only games and jokes, but also a majority of blogs and also news sites. The purpose of these sites are to bring in users and give them news or entertainment that brings them back to keep up with the site. Users often browse these sites for interesting bits of information or interaction and return to them to see if there are updates to the sites content. The main key to the popularity for these sites is new and interesting content, be they blog posts, video games, comic strips, or news articles. Boring content is ignored as are infrequently updated sites (though the latter can be compensated to a degree with exceptional content and RSS/Atom feeds).

Reference

Reference sites, while not only include sites like dictionaries and Wikipedia, but also include search engine. The main purpose for a reference site is be a repository on information on a facet of information. Users are more likely to search than browse on these sites and almost exclusively come to them only when they are looking for specific information. Unlike entertainment sites, they do not think of these sites as places to go to just to see what’s new. A reference site’s claim to repeat usage is current, accurate information that is easy to find that covers as much of the site’s region of specialty.

Applications

Applications are sites whose purpose is to give users tools for their lives or jobs. The suite of tools from 37 Signals, GMail, or flickr. The key to these site’s popularity is the niche they fill (i.e. does anyone actually need this functionality) and the interface to said functionality (i.e. I want to use this, but can I figure out how).

What I’m Missing

There are sites have different segments that fall into different genres, as well as some sites that could be considered crossovers, such as some (usually technical) blogs that can be mined for reference information but also cover news in their sphere of interest to keep users coming back.

The one type of site that confuses me is social networking sites. Are they Entertainment or Application or, like the blogs referenced above, are they a fusion of the two?

Why it matters

If you understand ahead of time the type of site you are trying to be before you put it together and keep in mind the what brings a user to that type of site as well as what the normal usage habits for that type of site are (i.e. how the user will expect to interact with it), you can build your site to make use of those preconceptions and usage patterns to make the experience more enjoyable for its eventual users. Sites that try to lump in bits of each genre or expect users to interact with their reference site like an entertainment site will confuse and alienate the user.

This is the failure I feel of the current organization I work for in that instead of focusing on their sites as reference sites and rolling out an integrated entertainment site for news and updates, they are expecting users to view their site as in entertainment site which pretty much all research says is not how the site is viewed or used. In turn, it makes it harder for the user to find information they want and also makes it much more difficult for the organization to communication news and information to the user.