Being new to this business we find our company disagreeing on development direction for web sites. Half of the company believes that an upscale, all encompassing web site is the way to go. The other half believes that a small, focused-on-one-thing web site is the way to go. For example, one half of the company would develop a tiddly-winks "lifestyle" website that encompasses everything a tiddly-wink player would want: equipment, clothing, accessories, home decor, etc. The other half would develop a site that only focused on one area: say tiddly-winks thumb guards for examples sake. These web sites would generate money from affiliate programs relating to their respective areas and traffic would be generated from PPC ads. For those of you that are successful in making a living from developed web sites, which would you recommend? I should also add that the size of the company is only two people only one of which is a web developer so there aren't a lot of development resources.
Personally, I'd say the theme of the niche plays a role in deciding which way to go with your question. For instance, the "tiddly-winks" niche would be narrow enough that an all-encompassing site shouldn't be too hard to accomplish and would remain reasonable in size. However, if you were developing a site about programming, then obviously you'd want to focus on a specific type of programming, in a specific language and etc. in order to carve out a narrow slice from the big pie so-to-speak. Good luck, Scott
Well in this case the subject of argument is a sport that is huge encompassing young and old, male and female. There's ton of competition in this market which means trying to advertise for every area this sport encompasses is going to be very expensive. You can probably tell from my response that I am for the focused niche type sites.
A topic on a site has to be critical mass before it's useful. It's possible that by creating a monster huge site, you will not meet this critical mass for any of your topics. However, there are tremendous benefits to offering all things tiddlywinks under the same roof (or in this case the domain name). Just from convience alone, I'd rather make one order to one site than have to go through the process 5 times. Then again, you are not selling merchandise, you are selling traffic. I, personally, feel that the best mentality is to cram as many niche sites as possible under the same domain / subdomain. If you take this approach, you will have a large site, but more importantly, you will well developed individual portions of your site. SEO From an SEO standpoint, I think you will gain more links with a large, comprehensive site. Then again, people typically link to one page with standout stuff on it. If I came up with a "hit" that numerous people thought was valuable enough to link to, I'd want that going to a comprehensive site, not just a niche. You miss out on a lot of synergy. Anyway, that's my opinion. Brandon