How to organize (sub) domain name structure for multi product website

web architecture

[foxpyt]

Hi

We are in the travel business and want to redesign our website and make it more professional.

We have different products with quite different customer groups (e.g. Cabo Verde for beach holidays, India for luxury round trips and special airline fares for Immigrants only). Some are multilingual some not.

How to organise the website structure to best fit the customer, SEO and complexity?

Our Webmaster says: one site per product to reduce compexity.
Our Designer/Marketing Consultat says: One site with all products for better cross selling.
For better key word quality I would go for one subdomain per product but all products on the same domain to cumulate click rate.

What is your experience?

Thanks for advice.
Fox

[dbdev]

look at all the top travel sites... i don't see a subdomain for each product/trip/destination

googlebot is not going to purchase a ticket... tell your webmaster to stick to what he knows which is prescribing information technology solutions that drive business objectives.

the travel industry is saturated in the serps world... having the key phrase as part of the domain name (was effective back in 2001. se algos have evolved since then.

you might want to look at a CMS such as DotNetNuke to faciliate the separation of function from interface whilst under the same roof.

welcome to webmasterworld.

[nealrodriguez]

yeah, i believe one page per product would suffice; with a recommendations on the sidebar if you want to cross-sell; 'buyers of the widget player also bought the widget speaker.' a good practice is to ensure that people are clearly giving an eye path to follow leading them to a call to action: purchase, newsletter subscription; if you are going to integrate newsletter subscription you may want to provide a sign up form to a newsletter specific to each product.

[foxpyt]

Interesting two different proposals.

Thanks for the replies.

I checked für DotNetNuke. Seems technically what we need. But i found little support in Europe and in our languages german/french.

Our webmaster wants to go with Joomla. But I am not convinced yet if that ist really professional enough.

Fox

[Fortune Hunter]

Our webmaster wants to go with Joomla.

I know there will be some here that disagree with me on this, but I wouldn't do that. Joomla is an open source platform and while it may be good when it is working it is a real pain when it isn't. There is no technical support so you (or your webmaster) have to comb through online bulletin boards and other places to dig up answers to problems.

I design sites for companies, but I won't use an open source platform unless it is for my own site and I don't care if it takes me forever to solve a problem because it is my own site.

[foxpyt]

Hi Fortune Hunter

What technologie would you choose then?

Fox