Our company has expanded a lot over the years, but I don’t know how we should showcase that on the website (… and maybe even have multiple sites or subsites?).
This is a question I’ve heard a lot recently. Over time, a company grows. That growth can take a multitude of forms. Let’s look at a few of them:
Product Expansion
A single product that helps a small audience. Over time, new products are developed that larger groupings of the same audience (ie. a product to help students in the classroom, then expands to teachers, then expands to schools, and lastly expands to include school districts)
New Verticals
The product created for a specific industry’s problem can also be repackaged to solve new industry’s problems.
Connected Products
Tangential products are created that work alongside each other well. A menu is created for potential clients to pick-n-choose from.
Mergers & Acquisitions
Lastly, we have mergers and acquisitions – however, a lot of M&A activities could be summarized in the above points as well.
How on earth do I structure a website with all of this new activity going on? There are three core ways to think through your website strategy.
Same site, new pages
Ask yourself these two questions:
- Is what I’m selling to the same type of audience
- Can I cross-sell?
If the answer to either of those questions is yes, you’ll likely want to expand your current site. Your visitors will have similar goals, and they should easily be able to navigate around your site to find what they are looking for.
Also, think about the content you are creating regularly (blogs, news articles, case studies). If the answers to either of the above questions are yes, that also means that content will resonate with the vast majority of your customers. You’ll want to cross-link that content across multiple pages of your site (and that’s a lot simpler when everything is inside of the same website).
Building a site per product is a common trap
I’ve worked with many clients whose company begins with a single product that targets a very narrow audience. Over time, they build new products that either target: (a) different verticals or (b) a larger set of customers in the same vertical. When they DIY their website solution, they come to me with multiple websites and can’t figure out how to manage them.
Content becomes a chore because they really want the same blog posts across all of these websites, but it requires a lot of effort to do that correctly.
I’d rather see you have a single website that is too large and needs to be divided up versus consolidating multiple web presences. Stay simple.
Subsites
For systems
First off, subsites typically live on subdomains (ie. accounts.classiccity.com).
The most common use for subsites is when different systems are tied to them. A few examples:
- An advisor may have an education portal for clients to login to
- An agency would have a project management system that clients can login to
- Hosting companies have an email portal their customers can log in to
- A real estate agent can have a portal clients can access to see all the houses the agent thinks are good fits
- A lawyer will have a system where you can upload all of your documents privately and securely
Most of these are examples are tied to places people can access and login. These subsites are typically different platforms from the CMS your marketing website was built on.
Non-systems
That now leaves us with all the non-system examples (which there are a lot fewer).
A majority of these use cases come into play for organizations that fall somewhere between medium and enterprise (that is assuredly a wide range). There is a higher chance that these organizations have their main marketing websites built a custom/inflexible platform. If their website wasn’t built with a “blog section,” there would be a tremendous lift to bolt it on.
In that case, creating a new subsite that can run something simple (like WordPress) would be a great sandbox. This way, they can confirm that consistent content creation can actually move the needle before investing in a large change to their main marketing site.
Separate websites
Is what you are offering to the marketplace have different audiences or messages? If so, building out separate sites is your best bet.
Let’s walk through an example.
I know someone whose company was started by building digital curriculum for teachers and schools. Everything was 100% online, and therefore could scale easily. The target audience was initially to teachers but then expanded to principles and school district leaders.
Later down the road, they realized all the content was in place to start an online K-12 program where students could get a degree. The target audience here was to parents who currently homeschool their kids and wanted to have a “one stop shop” for everything they needed (including faculty to run courses).
At the end of the day, the core product is fairly identical (the online courses), however the distribution channels and potential buyers vary drastically. Right now, they have a single website that showcases both of their offerings.
Through some customer research, they realized that it has caused some confusion to visitors when they see “Enrollment/Tuition” alongside of “Purchase Courses.”
When your audiences are different and you are solving different problems, chances are you need separate websites to talk to each.
What’s next?
Stay simple. Before investing in whole new systems and structures, test your ideas. I always recommend starting on your current website and getting feedback from there. As I mentioned above: it’s simpler to expand into multiple online presences (once the requirement is confirmed) than it is to consolidate multiple websites that were created too quickly.
If you want some help thinking through things, you can take a look at our discovery questionnaire to help guide the process a bit.