When you begin blogging, you may start by blogging about everything under the sun. Then it may come to a point in time that you find yourself developing a new interest or hobby in a very specific area- that’s when you may be creating new blogs to focus on them. You can call them niche blogs or blogs dealing with more specific topics.
I started from a blog that talked about very general everyday life things- like work, ideas, projects, philosophy, health, creative works, travel, etc. From a general blog, I’ve since created separate blogs to focus on certain topics from this blog:
- Health through lifestyle change and complementary healing– it has a blog of its own which I’ve maintained since 2006
- Archives on sites, artists or articles that inspire creativity and craft
- Travel blogs: Thailand, Malaysia, Angkor Wat and Sri Lanka
If you’ve already purchased your own domain name, you may want to consider creating new sites riding on that domain name like I do. By doing this, you need not purchase new domain names for each new site/blog.
The question is, should the name of your new site goes before or after your domain name? In my example, I’ve bought the domain name yinteing.com. And let’s say when I want to create a site using the name “visit-malaysia”, I have the following options of naming the site:
- visit-malaysia.yinteing.com, or
- yinteing.com/visit-malaysia
I plan to write this article in mind for those who is html challenged- because if you know html, you can basically overwrite anything by writing scripts. So for those who do not know and want to keep things as simple as possible, you would need to consider, the purpose of starting a separate site/blog.
Do you want the look and feel of the new site to be different than your existing blog? If yes, then you need to choose to have the new name before your domain name, example visit-malaysia.yinteing.com (do not forget the full stop before your domain name). By doing that, you have the option of customising your blogs to be different because basically, they’re not linked to one another.
This serve its purpose as you want to create a specific blog to write on a specific topic- so everything in your navigation bar, header and footer should reflect predominantly on the topic you write about.
For better illustration of what I’m trying to say, go to my site http://about.yinteing.com/ where I list down all my blogs. If you click on every blog listed there, you will notice the theme, ie layout, background colours, fonts, etc are different.
The creative side of me enjoy experimenting with different themes. With the new version of WordPress release, you can immediately install a new theme directly when you login to update your posts- you need not login to your hosting company to upload.
On the other hand, if you choose to have a new site created after your domain name, eg yinteing.com/visit-malaysia, you would need to get the help of someone who know how know how to personalise website to do a page with a different layout.
This approach is required especially for companies who have an official website (there is a different between a formal corporate website and a blog) but intend to create a blog. And they would normally have the additional resource of a programmer at their disposal.
For you and me who have none, then if you adopt that approach, the new site/blog will have the same navigation, header and footer as your current one. As such, if you may confuse readers who only want to read about the specific topic that you want to blog about.
