1 Large site with categories or 10 mini sites?

Is it worth it to brand 30 sites or better to use a portal?

[Sports Workout]

I own a site which has 30 different categories of widgets. Someone interested in the widgets in Category A is not likely to be interested in the widgets in Category B, or C, etc (although it does happen occassionally).

What i'm trying to say is, i have one major niche, but about 30 different niches within this one major niche.

Am I better off creating sites for each of these 30 categories of widgets (probably a similar template for each). Or should I stick with one large site which links out to different categories -- all maintained from the one large site?

What are the major benefits for keeping one large site that links out? The drawbacks?

What are the benefits of using 30 different mini sites targeted more specifically? The drawbacks? (aside from 30 hosting bills per month!)

Interested to hear. I've already heard several different opinons on this topic elsewhere.

Zack

[derekwong28]

We have two sites in the past carrying identical products: one which claims to specialize in product type A and one in product type B. Both receive the same number of visitors per day. Sales at the site which claims to specialize in product A are overwhelmingly those of product A and vice-versa. However, we found that we can no longer keep up anymore with the administrative complexities anymore and merged the two sites. This just might as well because sales of product A were going to collapse anyway because of price rises.

To maximize your sales, by all means create as many sites as possible. You can pay one hosting fee with a reseller account. However, the administrative complexities are considerable especially with regards to e-mail accounts and customer follow-ups. Also it may take longer to build up PR ranking with Google.

In summary if you want to go for maximum sales, you should create as many sites as possible but the time and the problems which may arise may not be worth it.