Argh. New domain, subdomain, or subdirectory for new project??

6 replies
Hi there,

I've got a 6 year old PR4 site. It's got 20k uniques per month and is a well known brand in its niche.

I'm launching a big new initiative - an annual competition within the niche.

I want to brand the competition with a flashy new wordpress theme, which isn't suitable for my main site as the content on the main site is heavy text, whereas this is more whizz-bang.

I cannot make up my mind whether to set it up as

newcompetition.myoldsite.com
newcompetition.com
myoldsite.com/newcompetition

Has anyone got any thoughts re SEO, type in traffic, confusing existing customers who don't know where to go, confusing new customers who wander between the two themes, etc?

Cheers,

T
#argh #domain #project #subdirectory #subdomain
  • Profile picture of the author Jill Carpenter
    Do you envision selling the competition site as it's own thing in the future? Or would a future buyer of your present website be packaged into grabbing this sub-category?

    I think the answer to that can help you narrow things down.

    If you are already using wordpress, there is a plugin that allows you to select which theme displays on which page. If the new site is not going to be monsterous in size you could get away with mysite.com/contest

    Otherwise, if it will have it's own large size and will be sold as part of the whole package then toss it on the sub-domain.

    Does this make sense?

    You don't sound like you are looking to sell at this time - but this has become my personal train of thought when deciding what things are worthy of having their own domain. Think of the end asset that you would be selling.
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    • Profile picture of the author Thaddeus
      Good thought, Jill.

      It's going to be perhaps 10 -20 pages in all, so tiny really. I expect in the end to generate over 50% of the total revenue, and I can't see me selling it in the short to mid term. So on that basis the mysite.com/contest setup is fine.

      Still worried about the theme being completely different once you step into mysite.com/contest.

      Hmm.

      Any other thoughts?
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      • Profile picture of the author Jill Carpenter
        Well, it is a "special" thing going on so I wouldn't be so concerned with the theme looking different. You have 2 options for this. One is the plugin I mentioned above, and the other would be to have some additional stylized theme sheets that you can select when posting things specific to this contest.

        These could be created to pick up some elements from your current site so it can have its own unique look yet still compliment your primary site.

        Can I ask what theme you are currently using? Did you have it custom made?
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        • Profile picture of the author Thaddeus
          It's a pretty standard version of Thesis, which has been great, but I'm bad at the graphics end of it, so after a lot of fiddling around text and layout it looks pretty good, but not nearly impactful enough for the competition.

          I was actually thinking about a fresh install of WP on the subdirectory and this new theme, which would cost a grand total of $35!

          Hadn't occurred to me there might be a way of restricting a new theme to just a few pages. What is that plugin?

          T
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          • Profile picture of the author Jill Carpenter
            Ha - lol, so I just nuked my server a few weeks ago and had to hunt for where I was:

            http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ate-theme.html

            You might need to do a lot of work with this so I'm not sure it is the best solution in your particular case.

            Personally if I were in your shoes I'd probably have some custom page templates created for me that I could select to display (you can pick them right before you make a post).

            Create a category for the competiton - then create a page to display that specific category - and then select the specialized template page to post things related to the competition category.

            You can probably get someone to make you a couple of custom theme pages for that 35 bucks if you hunt around the forum.

            Here is a nice little plugin I just found too that may make it easy for you to display the competion in a widget on your main blog: WordPress › Category Posts Widget « WordPress Plugins

            Just to daze and confuse you even more...:p
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            • Profile picture of the author Thaddeus
              Mmmm, even more options :/

              Thanks - I'm going to have a think!
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