Boyink! - Spring Forward on the Web

Personally,  I think it’s best for a corporate blog to have its own seperate site, name and identity.  It’s a statement that this is something different from what we normally do - it’s where we let our hair down a bit.  It’s also easier for readers to find the home page of the blog. Link >>

Whoo boy, do I disagree.

One of the things I always recommend to companies with multiple sites at multiple domains is to build a site framework to include all of the owned assets, all under one roof, with one identity and one overarching user experience—as well as one content managment system and team driving the entire thing. 

Doing anything else always leads to a situation where economies of scale aren’t being taken advantage of with multiple teams using multiple platforms to publish multiple sites that often put more than one “corporate face” on the web.

Get in a situation like that and then try to change the company logo…;)

Some other reasons it would be a bad idea to seperate out a new company blog:

• This makes the blog look like an experiment, easily “killed” if it doesn’t work out.
• It creates an identity crisis—“will the true Company X please stand up?”
• From a search engine optimization perspective it pits the blog against the parent” site—and the blog will probably win.
• You’re going to need to link the two sites together anyway, so why not just have the blog live under the parent site?
• The blog home page will not be any easier to find - somewhere somehow the user is going to have to choose a link to the blog—either from a list of links in a search engine, or a list of links on the parent site.
• The parent site is already the one being advertised, printed on letterhead and business cards, and on the product packaging - much better for the blog URL to ride on that existing promotional channel

A much better idea is to use a blogging tool that would allow you to put blurbs, titles or a “mini-blog” on the corporate home page, with multiple links to the full blog.  This gives the blog top-level visibility and keeps it at the same domain as the corporate site.

Comments are closed, but you can read the comments other people left.

1. Jim Seybert on August 12, 2005

   YES -

   A good old boy in Texas once told me, “Confusion is the mother of indecision.” When presented with too many choices, choosers just won’t choose. The corporate blog can be the “silly uncle Bob” of the corporate family, but it needs to be PART of the family for all the reasons you list.

2. Scott Dean on August 18, 2005

   You are right on the money!  I have heard people say they use different domains so they can track the effectiveness of marketing materials.  They use a different w: address on each marketing piece.  All they really end up doing is confusing their target market.

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