Issue-specific sites, sites devoted to a single product or service, and mini-sites for other purposes can be a great alternative to building out new sections of your main online presence. Here’s why.
Content management systems (CMS) have been, on the whole, a great step forward in the evolution of the web. They allow site owners to maintain their own sites without the friction (in time and money) of having to go through a technical team to add, edit, and delete content. This has fueled the rise of content marketing and increased the power and value of a well-crafted website.
But the capabilities that a CMS gives a marketing team also can create Frankenstein’s monster: a website that over time comes to feel as if it as cobbled together from discarded parts of other websites.
Frequently this is because the marketing team is in the habit of making the changes it wants, when it wants to make them, and may not realize that an addition may not really work within the structure of the site they have.
That is a perfect opportunity to build a mini-site – when you need to present your story in a way that your current site won’t easily allow.
Usability Issues
Frequently, this is less a technical issue than it is a usability issue. A mini-site avoids forcing your site visitors to change gears quite so abruptly. A well implemented CMS will allow you to add new templates to accommodate your new content, but those templates won’t always mesh well with what already exists on the site. So you wind up forcing your audience to make a leap, which can be jarring. A mini-site can re-calibrate expectations and eliminate these usability issues.
Flexibility
The other side of this same coin is the flexibility that a clean slate gives you. Your team can think outside of the design and navigational constraints in place on your existing site. Marketers and graphic designers can collaborate to create an entirely different experience if that serves the mini-site’s purposes.
Add Attention
You may not always want to make that kind of splash, but when you do, a complete change of scenery will help draw additional attention to your message and set it apart from your regular message. In this case, a mini-site is akin to a talking head saying, “We now bring you this breaking news” into one camera before turning to another and, well, delivering the breaking news.
Extend Your Brand
Another reason to consider a mini-site is to support brand extension. A new initiative may be a bit outside the norm of your offerings. You may feel that even though you have an eye toward making it a part of your main suite of products or services, for now, your overall brand and the new extension would both benefit from a little space. The mini-site, especially if it is designed to be distinct from but clearly related to your main brand, will help you accomplish this.
From a practical perspective, it can also make sense to build a stand-alone site if you know the site isn’t permanent and adding and then deleting it from your main presence is more work than building and deleting. This can be true even if the mini-site is seasonal and will be re-used in the future.
Don’t Forget SEO
There can be SEO and other implications to building a new site, so be sure to include your SEO team at the earliest opportunity in your planning.
A stand-alone site can be launched in a number of ways – on a separate domain entirely, as a subdomain of your main presence (minisite.yourdomain.com) or in a subdirectory of your existing site. (yourdomain.com/minisite). There are advantages and disadvantages to all these approaches, so be sure to explore them before making your final decision.
