Business vision
If one interprets business broadly, to mean 'what keeps one busy' (a trade, profession, calling or hobby), then most websites have a business role. Perhaps the business of business is to make money. The business of the church is different, as is the business of art. Yet all these activities benefit from vision.
'A gleam in a father's eye' has been the origin of many successful business. Some entire business's are glimpsed at the outset. Others mutate until they are unrecognisable. But there almost always has to be a 'vision' to motivate the creator.
A vision can be wide or a vision can be narrow. One cannot say that one is best. But perhaps one can judge whether a website is motivated by 'a vision'. I would say that the websites run by Google.com and the Vatican both have this quality. One provides knowledge of this world; the other provides knowledge of the next world.
'What keeps one busy' need not be making money. It is indeed often the case that 'you get more for love than you get for money'. Project Gutenberg and Bartleby.com are two of the most inspiring web projects in this category: they aim to make the world's literature available to everyone free of charge. Many Web Art sites and Web Poetry sites also come into the category of sites which do not have making money as their business.
But the web is also about e-Commerce. Before the Great Dotcom Crash, web pundits had a favourite quotation from the movie Field of Dreams: "build it and they will come". For web businesses, it did not work. One of the most famous web business disasters is described by one of its founders. Boo.hoo by Ernst Malmstenand, tells the story of boo.com. It is a fabulous tale of how, in less than 2 years, they started a company, raised $135m, sold $1m of goods and went into liquidation. All the way through, one feels they deserved to succeed. But in fact the only things they got right were the graphic design of the website, the PR and the delightful Miss Boo. The founders were still under 30 by the time it was all over.
The brief to the boo website design team, at Organic - who do not list Boo.com as one of their major clients, was 'The design should be sporty and edgy "with a smile on the face"' (p.150). At a fairly late stages in launching the website it was put to financial and technical analysts. The financial analyst spent a short time with a calculator and told them 'There's no way you're going to do it. And even if you do, you're going to blow way too much money getting there'. The technical analysts took a little longer but were more blunt 'you're fucked'. In boo.com's closing stages, after the March 2000 Dotcom Bust, their bankers advised them to 'slow the burn rate' by sacking staff. The founders thus comprehensively disproved the adage 'build it and they will come'.
At Ghost Sites Steve Baldwin has collected screenshots of the homepages of the famous Dead Dotcoms. Many of them were taken on the day they announced their closure. The gallery holds about 1,000 'Ghosts' and most have a Web Elegy explaining what went wrong and why. Here is his comment on perhaps the Boo crash: "So much has been written about the fate of Boo.com by self-aggrandizing insiders and stunned and incredulous outsiders that I would suggest that the metatags on its home page, viewable by doing a "view source" on the Boo.com home page saved at the Internet Archive, present a far more eloquently compact view of what this unbelievably expensive, ambitious, flawed Web shopping portal was trying to do during its brief run in the limelight'. Those were the days my friends.To say that Boo.com's founders lacked business vision would be unfair. Perhaps their mistake was to be 3 years early. But the story does illustrate one aspect of business vision which they did lack: a belief in steady growth. The entry costs for web operations are comparatively low and the operations extremely scalable. You can start by selling half a dozen items. Then you can expand to a worldwide corporation by baby steps. It is the perfect way to 'grow a business'.