Expanding "peripheral" content of your site

Will this kill a theme based site?

[Liane]

It is low season here and I have time on my hands, so I'm getting itchy to do something productive. I have a very detailed, sailing/boating (business) site which provides my livlihood. The site has a PR5 and very respectable results in the SERPS for targeted keywords and phrases.

Currently, the site is themed and deals with only those areas of the business which our customers ask about all the time. However, there are peripheral areas of information which could also be included such as knot tying, boating safety, regattas & racing, rigging, equipment ... well you get the idea.

The last thing I want to do is hurt the site in any way, but I would like to offer more info along the lines of general boating information. I have a good amount of knowledge in these areas and am able to write reasonably well.

The question is; should I do it? If so, how do I do it so as not to impact the site negatively? Can adding more "peripheral" content help impact the site positively by way of PR?

[onlineleben]

Why not create special mini-sites for some of the themes you mentioned? You get traffic from a different user base as your main site, so that you can target these mini-sites for them and also include a homepage link to your main site -> improving link pop. Try to get these sites on different IPs.
If you use a similar design for these mini-sites as for your main site, you can link to them as well and they then seem to be part of your overall web appearance.

[Liane]

Thanks onlineleben. I wondered if splitting it off onto another url would be necessary. Do others agree that it would hurt the existing site by expanding the content?

[topr8]

my view is that focusing on the main site is better

Reasons for a seperate site ...

1. for a seperate yahoo listing, my experience is that a very specific listing with good title and description can be golden - old news really.

Reasons for the same site ...

1. bigger is better with google
2. i'm amazed at the unsolicited incoming links i get to information parts of my site, all helping to build my overall PR
3. IMO more manageable to run a big site than 2 or 3 smaller ones.

my experience has been positive of deleloping extra themes in the same site, especially when they are related or complimentary topics like you are planning.

i work in an entirely unrelated field to you but it is actually very similiar and have been successful at developing a multi themed (but with a common thread) main website, my basic strategy is to build a mini site of around 12 pages on a subtheme and integrate it into the site using the classic theme pyramid model, eg link within the theme and upwards but not accross into other themes