List of genres
Personal
A personal page is almost always home-made, i.e. not designed by a hired professional. It is mainly characterized not by content (as it can be about anything), but by style, which is informal, subjective and usually not aimed at any specific audience.
Informative
An informative page is permanently interesting (as opposed to journalistic, which is usually tied to current events). It can be about products or services, but its purpose must not be to try to sell something – a user manual is considered informative (even though it may contain some promotional elements), while a sales brochure is not (even though it may give factual information about a product).
Journalistic
A journalistic page is usually particularly interesting at the time of publication (as opposed to informative, which is usually permanently interesting). Sometimes it can be distinguished from informative by considering who is likely to have written it – if an article has probably been written by a journalist (who may be specialized in the field the article is dealing with), then it is journalistic; if it has probably been written by an expert in the field the article is dealing with (who may have a knack for popular writing), then it is informative.
Commercial/promotional
A commercial/promotional page is not necessarily commercial – it can be only promotional (such as a website of a political party). It may be informative, but its intent is not to inform, but to sell (possibly metaphorically, as in the case of the political party website). It may enable visitors to buy something online [example], but only as long as this is merely an additional feature of a website that is promoting some products or services, not a dedicated store (or in other words, selling one’s own products or services is commercial/promotional, selling the products of others is shopping).
Shopping
A shopping page is concerned only with selling. This means that the page usually does not belong to the maker of the products it is selling, which is what makes it different from commercial/promotional page.
Official
Scientific
A scientific page must be interesting to scientists in the field it is dealing with. A page at a high-school level is unlikely to be scientific, while a university-level page could be.
Prose fiction
[The Best Laid Plans, a short fanfiction story]
Poetry
FAQ
[DVD Frequently Asked Questions (and Answers)]
Index
An index is page with lots of links to other webpages (not files that are meant to be downloaded – that would be content delivery) and little else. Links can be in the form of pictures, so a page with thumbnails could also be considered an index. Multiple links are expected to interest a visitor and usually one could easily imagine that additional links could be added.
Gateway
A gateway is a page with one or few links and little else. Its purpose is to take the visitor someplace else. Only one of the links is expected to interest a visitor – for example, on a page where you have to choose your language before proceeding [example], only one choice will typically be interesting to each visitor.
Community
The owner of a community page only contributes some sort of framework, while the content is provided by the visitors. A page that is in principle community can be belong to another genre, for instance, a forum post can also be informative [a primer on a trading-card game deck].
Content delivery
A content delivery page has links to non-HTML files or has non-HTML files embedded. While such a page could be assigned a genre based on these files, assigning a genre to any file is beyond our scope, not to mention that users typically do not consider a program or even a PDF file that can be downloaded from a page a part of the page in the sense they consider text.
User input
Entertainment
Entertainment pages have a significant overlap with other genres (content delivery).
Adult
Adults pages have a large overlap with other genres (content delivery, prose fiction), but adult is also a distinctive genre of its own whose identification could be very beneficial for a lot of users.
Children's
[a page teaching children to count, a children's rhyme]
Like adult, children's pages have a very large overlap with other genres (entertainment, informative), but also like adult, children's is a genre of its own whose identification could be beneficial for a lot of users.
Blog
Blogs have a large overlap with other genres (personal, journalistic), but blog is also a very distinctive genre of its own.
Error message
Error messages are not particularly interesting, but they do not fit into any other genre and are relatively common.