Visitor Type 1 Someone that has never encountered your business or your website - will probably be looking for some sort of assurance as to who you are, accreditations, testimonials, evidence and the like.

Visitor Type 2  Someone that has encountered your business before but never visited your website - on the other hand, probably won’t be interested in this as he / she has already encountered your business. More likely they’ll be looking for new information that they didn’t get when they encountered your offline business – perhaps case studies, client list, samples of products etc.

Visitor Type 3  Someone that has encountered your business and your website before - will be different again – unless you regularly update your website Type 3 visitors won’t come back very often and in the end you will find that you don’t have any visitors that fall into Type No. 3 at all.
Now that you have broken down your visitors in this way you need to start thinking about what each type of visitor will be looking for from their experience.

Bear in mind though that is just one simple way of differentiating between visitors. You could differentiate on their product needs, the colours they prefer, their demographic information, sex, average order value, loyalty to you etc. A great example to illustrate this principle in practice is to look at any university homepage.
In the ‘olden’ days when websites were a relatively new phenomenon people hadn’t embraced the idea of differentiation or ‘channelling’ and when you visited a university homepage it tended to be cluttered with lots and lots of information all aimed at nobody in particular.