Information websites

Information sites provide information and resources. This website, make-website.com is an information site.
A well-known information site on the internet is wikipedia.org (the English version is en.wikipedia.com) Wikipedia is a dictionary that is being continually edited and put together by internet users.

Information can also take the form of videos or audio on the net.

Adding information to your site
Even if your site is not going to be strictly an information site, it's often a good idea to include some information for people coming to your site. Search engines also love good quality, original content. (Search engines do not discern between the literary style of Chaucer and a real estate ad, but can tell if a site is 'spammy', or has the exact same content as another site.)

Imagine you are selling kites - you could add a few pages on the history of kite flying, or a how-to-make-your-own-kite page.
If you are unsure how to go about adding information to your sales website, take a look at Ebay to see how they add in information that may be useful to their customers.

An information site can feature a special hobby or interest of yours. If you happen to have a hobby or interest that not many other people on the internet have made a website about - you may get a lot of people who share your interest coming to look at your website.

Niche sites
Small information sites that feature a subject that is not widely-known to the general public are called 'niche' websites. Many niche sites do very well, because the person who started the website is passionate and knowledgeable about the subject. They get a name as someone who really knows their stuff.

With decent traffic (numbers of people coming to your site) you may be able to start selling something related to your niche, or sell advertising space.

Writing a guide
Guides provide information on how to do something. The site, howstuffworks.com is an example of a site that provides instructions on how to do just about anything.

Guides can also be on a single subject, such as a guide to assist people who are about to buy their first digital camcorder: buycamcordertoday.com


Article sites
Some sites consist purely of articles - sometimes up to thousands of articles, written by thousands of different authors. Type "article sites" into a search engine to find many sites that contain articles. Different sites may contain many of the same articles, as authors may submit them to hundreds of article sites.

digg.com is an example of a very popular site that contains thousands of articles, and also podcasts, video and images.