Purpose
The first thing you have to figure out is why you want a website. If you think you only want a personal homepage with some information about you and your pets so that your friends have something to check if they try the web sometime, it doesn't really matter what you include. But if you have some other goal with your website, like you have a business or you provide some kind of information or service that you want to attract visitors to, it's more important. Let's take a look at some of the most common purposes...
Information
Information is the most usual content on the web. It may be information about you, your interest, your company or business, organization, club, whatever, a price list of your products, dates of certain happenings or a helpful guide for dog owners just to mention something. An educational site like this one is also an example. What's important to remember is that just information is the absolutely most common content on a web page, so either you have to provide something extraordinary or you have to combine this with any other purpose (which is highly recommended).
Service
Maybe you have something special to offer, a service. Like user support for some product, a database, a "service" (like LinkExchange, AuctionBoard or something similar). To provide a unique service will most probably attract many people (if it's not a service which is only useful for a very small amount of people).
Advertisement
Also a very common purpose of a website, especially for commercial sites. It has some similarities with sites that simply provide information, but now it's about either a service or a product. The goal is that as many as possible should visit your website, find out about your product or service, then like and finally use it (buy it). Especially for these kind of sites it's important to use some kind of promotion to get visitors. See the promotion section for further information.
Entertainment
A site thats purpose is to be entertaining may include a great deal of different things. You may provide interactive games, contents or competitions, humor, interesting information, stories, pictures; well, that's what you've got to figure out.
Something completely different
Yes, if you manage to do something that no one has ever done before, consider yourself very lucky. Because now you've got a potential site which is really unique. Now just keep an eye on the web for another site that does the same thing, but just a little bit better. You always have to develop and improve your site.
Ok, do you know what your purpose is? A mixture of all the features above is something very recommended. An advertisement about cars may also have a little racing game for example. Then it will also attract game players who maybe weren't at all interested in cars from the beginning, but now they are because they were influenced by the game.
Last updated 970606