Questions about websites everyone asks

A common taxonomy: (1) brochure/business sites, (2) ecommerce stores, (3) portfolios, (4) blogs/publications, (5) landing pages, (6) directories, (7) booking/service sites, (8) membership/communities, (9) SaaS/web apps, (10) learning platforms, (11) news portals, (12) personal sites. The taxonomy matters less than the build implication: 1–7 share CMS economics, 8–11 need application engineering, and pricing follows that line — see the cost guide.

By count, business/brochure sites built on CMS platforms — WordPress alone powers roughly 43% of all websites. By revenue, ecommerce. For a new project the useful question is not popularity but fit: what you sell and how customers buy decides the type — the decision framework is in WordPress vs Shopify for the commerce case.

Roughly 1.1–1.2 billion registered domains exist, but active, reachable websites are estimated around 200 million — the rest are parked, duplicated or dead. The number that matters commercially: Google indexes pages from a few tens of millions of actively-maintained sites, which is the field you actually compete in.

Six main mechanisms: direct sales (ecommerce), advertising (traffic monetised via display networks), subscriptions/memberships, lead generation (selling enquiries to service businesses), affiliate commissions, and marketplace fees. Most profitable sites stack two or three. If your website must make money directly, that requirement should drive the build from day one — not be bolted on after launch.

Genuinely free options exist: WordPress.com (subdomain tier), Google Sites, Wix and similar builders' free plans. The honest catch: free means their domain in your URL, their ads at their discretion, limited SEO control, and terms that make "your" site partially theirs. Free is right for experiments; it is wrong for businesses — the reasoning is in no-code vs custom.

Zoho Sites offers a free tier with a Zoho subdomain and Zoho-branded footer; custom domains and the features businesses actually need require a paid plan. It competes with Wix/Squarespace/Google Sites in the same free-as-gateway model. For India-adjacent buyers it is a reasonable starter tool; for anything revenue-bearing, the real cost math starts once you pay anyway.

Yes — and you should insist on it. Ownership means: the domain registered in your name, hosting and CMS accounts under your email, site files and database you can export, and a contract stating the deliverable is yours. The most common bad outcome in web work is a business discovering it rents its own website from a departed developer. Every engagement from this desk hands over full ownership — and the handover checklist documents exactly what that looks like.

It can generate the code for simple pages, and it is a genuine accelerator for developers — but it cannot own outcomes: hosting, domains, emails, security, maintenance, or accountability when something breaks at 9pm. AI-built code still needs a human who can read it. The honest division of labour in 2026 is covered in the AI FAQ — and it is why this desk uses AI daily and still signs contracts.