Companies and individuals alike have practical and commercial reasons for setting up a website. A website enables you to communicate with like-minded individuals or potential clients on a worldwide basis. If you’re a creative talent of some kind, you can use a website to showcase your portfolio, offering online photographs, music tracks for download, or poetry. If you fancy yourself as a journalist, a blog enables you to get your opinion out there. If you own or work for a business, creating a website is often the most efficient means of marketing your company. And even if you just have a hobby, a website can be a great way of finding others who share your passion - while you may be the only person in town who likes a particular movie or type of memorabilia, chances are there are thousands of people worldwide who think the same, and a website can bring you all together. This is perhaps why the paper fanzine has all but died, only to be reborn online, where development costs are negligible and worldwide distribution is a cinch.
In practical terms, a website exists online all day, every day (barring the odd hiccup with ISPs), which certainly isn’t the case with printed media, which is there one minute and in the recycle trash the next. Distribution is less expensive than sending out printed material - a thousand-page website can be hosted for $10 per month or less, but sending a thousand-page document to one person (let alone a thousand or several thousand) may cost more than that. Likewise, development (particularly corrections and updates) is often significantly cheaper, too. For example, if you want to rework a print brochure, you have to redesign it and then reprint it. Reworking a section of a website often means swapping out a few files, which is efficient and affordable. So, for large companies and individuals alike, the ability to have relevant information online in a form that can often be updated in mere minutes, thereby keeping all interested parties up to date, is hard to resist!
More and more people are creating their very own personal websites, and with good reason - a personal website is a great way to share information about yourself with your family, friends, customers, and business associates.