Should we run one website or many for our various businesses?

If you manage a business with a few distinctly different major products or services, or if the company is structured less like a single entity and more like a group of specialised commercial concerns, you might wonder if it is best to operate a single large website under one domain-name, or various individual websites, each with separate domains or sub-domains.

The bottom-line is that a single site should be simpler and therefore cheaper to host and manage, but multiple websites allow you to better focus your marketing, branding and SEO efforts. This article looks at the pros and cons of each approach to help you make the right decision.

It is worth mentioning that when referring to multiple websites, it is expected that each is linked by a common header element which encourages visitors to click through to the other sites if they might be interested. At Sinclair Design we either use a 'tab' metaphor along the top of every page on each site for this purpose (example shown in side-column - click/tap the image to see the site), or we use simple link-words in a header bar. Thus any visitor to any of the sites can jump to any other of the grouped sites in a single click from any page. It is also expected that the overall presentational style of each site has some common design cues such that even with different logos and content, there is still some obvious visual consistency between each site.

Click this button to read the full article > Read More