Extreme Minisite Creation
Jul 22nd, 2008 | By Wallace Salvatore | Category: Articles, Code, Design, Featured, General, News
A minisite is a term for a small website which has a tight niche focus. Usually minisites contain just a handful of pages on a particularly small niche. Many large websites have spin off sites that focus on just one portion of the niche in the form of a minisite.
Extreme minisite creation involves thinking outside the square. Whilst anyone can put up a five page website, only the well researched ones will succeed. The first step to extreme minisite creation is figuring out the topic of your site. Here are some minisite topic examples:
Main niche: dog training
Minisite niche: dog training ebooks
Main niche: Improve your golf
Minisite niche: Golf swing training aids
Main niche: Dinner recipes
Minisite niche: Curry chicken dinner recipes
As you can see from the examples above, a minisite is an easy way to break down larger niches. By targeting a very tight niche market you are virtually guaranteed to get visitors to the site who are very focused on that particular topic. That makes marketing to them much easier than it would be on a broad topic website. If you know exactly what a person is searching for, it is much easier to give (or sell) it to them on a minisite.
The actual creation of an extreme minisite can come in a number of forms including:
- Hand coded HTML site
- Wordpress minisite
- Joomla minisite
- Free blog minisite
- Squidoo lens minisite
Hand coded HTML minisite
Whilst this may be the most time consuming option, it is the only option which allows you complete control over every element on your site. If you are comfortable with HTML then this is the choice for you.
Wordpress minisite
Wordpress takes minutes to set up and provides thousands of design options through themes. There are also helpful and useful plugins to add functionality to a site. Wordpress sites can be set up as static sites rather than blogs, which is suitable for minisites.
Joomla minisite
Joomla is a content management system which is normally used for large sites but can suit minisites.
Free blog minisite
It is possible to set up a free blog at Wordpress.com or Blogger.com
Set up takes minutes and although you don’t literally own the site, it is a free and easy to way set up a minisite.
Squidoo lens minisite
A similar concept to the free blog site, Squidoo allow you to set up “lenses”. You can either use this as your minisite or use a lens to promote and link to your minisite. Squidoo lenses tend to rank well in the search engines compared with a brand new minisite on its own domain.
Extreme minisites are not complicated and the rewards for setting up a network of minisites can be massive.
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Please accept our congratulations and our very best wishes for many more rewarding years at XWD.com.