Keeping web sprawl from spiraling out of control

A common side effect of a fast-growing business is an increase in online properties, sometimes referred to as web sprawl, which is essentially the over-creation of tangential brand websites. What starts out as one website developed for a product launch, a sub-brand or a marketing campaign, can quickly spiral out of control into multiple, difficult-to-manage web entities like country-specific sites, partner portals, customer support sites and blogs.

Although these sites can be considered necessary additions for a growing business, problems arise when those assets aren’t centrally managed. According to BitStrategist.com, there are three main issues that occur when multiple, disjointed websites begin to crop up:

Operational effort increases: More sites mean more people to manage them, whether it’s project managers, content managers or community managers. All of this management overhead adds up. Teams become far-flung, and added complexity may create situations where the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.

Technical effort and complexity increases: Multiple sites can mean multiple servers and content management systems. It also means more code, more developers and more version control. All mean more time and money.

Brand erosion can occur: Few companies have robust enough web design standards to enable distributed teams to launch sites that are “on brand” with a great core user experience (e.g., navigation systems, approaches to content presentation, visual identity). Instead, sites wind up going live that should never have seen the light of day, and brands can be damaged as a result.

The remedy for web sprawl, therefore, is having all of a business’s ancillary sites be simultaneously supported under the same runtime platform. These distinct websites are called extended sites or microsites, and in an extended-site architecture, a far more flexible and scalable solution is provided as opposed to what can come about when the traditional single-store design is replicated again and again.

Think of microsites from a corporation/subsidiary perspective whereby you share the assets of the corporation with its subsidiaries. Each subsidiary site is customized to have its own unique look and feel as well as its own products and marketing strategy to target a specific brand, audience or geographic region. The benefit is that each site will share corporate back-office operations like inventory, payment processing, tax and shipping calculations, reducing the number of moving parts that must be managed.

As an example, a maker of textbooks could target various university bookstores across hundreds of different college campuses under one umbrella. Each college bookstore would not only have its own unique marketing strategy of up-sells, cross-sells, promotions and advertising, but it would also share the various back-office operations of the hosting company to eliminate duplication and operational costs.

Microsites solve the business problem of providing online strategies on how to sell goods under multiple brands or products from different divisions but still share the back-office features of ordering, fulfillment and shipping. Technology costs can then be amortized across several departments or subsidiaries.

The business benefit of breaking down a commerce site into individual components and sharing those digital assets with other sites will allow the site to be deployed faster – providing a quick ROI as well as a reduction in capital and operational costs.

To get help consolidating all of your ancillary sites under one umbrella platform, contact the team of eCommerce experts at NetSphere Strategies. We have experience setting up microsites for all sorts of businesses, be it B2B or B2C.