“I need a website” is the start of a brief, not the whole thing — because a website built to be found and understood quickly is a different job from one built to sell products directly, which is a different job again from one built specifically to convert traffic from an active ad campaign. Treating all three as the same brief is how a lot of sites end up mediocre at everything they were actually meant to do.
A brochure website’s job is simple: exist, be found, and clearly explain what a business does and how to get in touch — the right call for a service business that isn’t selling online and doesn’t need to.
An ecommerce website’s job is to move a visitor from browsing to buying without friction — product pages, a cart, a checkout that actually works, none of which a brochure site is built to handle well.
A marketing website is a different animal again: built specifically to support and convert ongoing campaign traffic, with the tracking, structure, and conversion paths a paid campaign actually needs behind it — distinct from a one-off landing page tied to a single active campaign, which is a Paid Marketing job, not a Website Design one.
Knowing which of the three you actually need, before the build starts, is most of what determines whether the finished site feels like it was built for the job, or just built.
More on all three, on our Website Design page.
FAQ
Can one website do more than one of these jobs? Often, yes — a lot of sites are brochure-plus-ecommerce, for instance. Worth naming both jobs upfront rather than discovering the second one halfway through the build.