Well this post is going to be a bit lengthy so strap yourself in. Those of you who have been around for awhile sort of know the story of how the forum started, then the blog, then the shop. We sort of went with the flow and changed as needed to make things work. Well we are getting bigger everyday and maintaining this mess that we sort of created backwards is getting tough. We are considering doing a mass consolidation and moving everything to one domain. Before I go into detail about the restructuring I want to give some logic behind our thoughts. We've been doing a lot of research lately and it seems that the huge sites have the most power on the internet. If you think about it, it's true. We have 2 main domains that we are dealing with, handmadeartistsforum.com and handmadeartistsshop.com. The forum domain has a forum on it and a blog on it, the shop domain has a custom shop and a blog on it. To access them all you need three separate logins, one for the forum, one for the blog, and one for the shop and blog. This has been a major issue as we're constantly explaining that to our new members. We are considering on making a centralized login, not sure exactly how this is going to work and I'll touch on this later.
Now to the plan.We own probably 15 other domains that do not have sites on them and most are currently parked. If we had to start this thing from scratch I would of chosen the domain name handmadeartists.com well we own that one now as well
as well as handmadeartist.com without the "s", but we personally like the "s" as that is what we are a group of handmade artists. Ok on to more reasons before I go into the restructuring. The forum domain has pretty good page rank and say 80k-100k plus hits a day, the shop has good page rank and gets around the same depending on the day as the forum. Google sees this as two average size sites with decent but not earth shattering traffic. Now combine them and you have large site 200k+ hits a day and a whole bunch of content combined. Hope you see where I'm going.Next we promote our but off for both domains, if we still do all the same promotion it will all be going to the same domain, therefore building one large and growing site.
So here is the grand plan. We move the handmadeartistsshop.com to handmadadeartist.com We take the blog from the forum and the shop and merge it into one large blog. The blog would site on handmadeartists.com/blog. We take the forum and move the entire forum to handmadeartists.com/forum.We then take all the existing urls from both of the old domains and redirect them to the new site so all the existing internal links work, and all the existing external links will still work and be redirected to the new locations.For example if your existing shop url is handmadeartistshop.com/shop/username your new url would be handmadeartists.com/shop/username which is shorter. If someone clicks on a old like to the old shop name it will automatically be redirected to the new shop url at your shop.
So what will all this do, well all the external links to the forum over 74k and all the external links to the shop 290k will be combined, as these domains will be pointing to the new domain handmadeartists.com google will then give the site more relevance. All the traffic will now be measured from one domain which will help as google will say, this domain is getting a whole bunch of visitors therefore more relevance. We will have the opportunity to create a central login so that you will be able to access the forum, shop, and blog with one login. Now I'm not sure exactly how the centralized login will work, it might be a situation that existing users will still login separately and new users will have the luxury or one login for all site. Not sure so don't freakout if you don't get this benefit, think about it, did you use the same username on the shop as you did on the blog and forum? Or do you have 3 different username and 3 different passwords. Well the centralized login may get messy for existing members, everything will work don't worry, we are just not 100% sure yet how that part will go. Now the next thing that will be good is we are looking at upgrading the forum and to do that we have to make a new theme. The forum doesn't work like wordpress unfortunately, if you upgrade wordpress most themes will still function as normal. If you upgrade smf (the forum) you have to make a new theme. Anyway that is what we are planning on doing, upgrading the forum to the latest version and making a new theme. We are going to keep the same theme for the blog that we just made for the shop blog and merge the two blogs in one.Now that is the big picture for the sites which will soon become the site.Now some smaller things in the works are a
treasury type module for the shopContributors for the blogI actually believe we will also have a fb app for the shop as well, which I'm really excited about, this has been a bone of contention with our developer for a year.
These changes will take a while, but we feel that combining the domains into one and creating one large site will benefit everyone involved. Those that are not members of the shop need not worry either as if the integrated login occurs you will only have buyer privileges to the site. Hope all this makes sense, we would love to hear everyone thoughts and or questions about our future as handmadeartists.com
Topic: Considering Some Major Changes to all the Sites (Read 5950 times)
