A Little Background

I’ve been running a blog for 4 years that discusses just about anything I feel like writing. My car, backpacking trips, my church, marketing strategy, WordPress code, movies I see on the weekend, etc. I have also been running a separate blog for a little over a year focused primarily on creative writing. I have a third blog that serves as my professional portfolio.

I realized the other day that this is a huge convoluted mess, and I want to clear things up.

The Problem

Some people come to my main site looking for WordPress tutorials. Others come looking for spiritual essays. Others come because they can’t remember the link to my portfolio and are trying to find my resume. It makes it hard to attract feed subscribers when my content seems to be all over the place, but offering category-based subscriptions feels too limiting.

Ideal Endgame

What I’d love to to is build a kind of personal network of microsites. My three blogs are already a Multisite network, that’s not the issue. But I think I need to split them into more than three sites. Maybe one site for tech stuff, one site for religion, one site for personal stuff, one site for fiction, one for showing off my portfolio, etc.

I’d also like to fully integrate my Facebook interactions and my Twitter community … without duplicating content in multiple places (my last attempt at Twitter interaction re-created all my Tweets as custom post types within WordPress … too much clutter).

The Question

What is the best way to structure a blog network with a single author that covers so much disparate content? It needs to be as easy as breathing to move from one part of the network to another – making content discoverability high. Completely separate WP sites don’t quite lend themselves to that, but spinning off categories doesn’t keep the content separate enough.

Should I add other domains to the mix and try to push visitors from one domain to another, or is that too much distinction between the sites? Think of CNN, where you have a landing page that mashes up everything, but iReport, the tech page, the political blogs, and local pages are almost their own websites.

The interaction between Gizmodo, Lifehacker, and their other sites is also a great example of the idea I want to accomplish … but a horrible example of the design behind it (not a fan of their new designs).

1. Your sites look nothing alike. Open those three links – and there is not a single element that binds all three sites together. Network of sites can benefit from consistent looks.

2. You could use global “about” page that covers all of your activity and not just bits in context of specific site. Consider building landing page that will summarize yourself, your network of sites and topics they cover, means of contact, etc. Plus recent activity from Twitter and your network.

3. Have capable and prominent search through all of the network. It’s easy to build with Google CSE and will immensely help people that landed in the wrong place.

4. Make good use of related posts. Consider what visitor sees when finishing article – is there something that he seamlessly continue to or is it surrounded by completely unrelated posts? On other hand it is probably harder to implement for network, than in context of single site that covers multiple topics…