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Should You Have One Site
or Two Web Sites?

Some infertility organizations ask "should we have one site or two Web sites?"  Here are some examples of situations where you might think about having two sites:

• you have a lab and a medical clinic
• you offer two rather different types of services
• you offer a services and products
• You offer women's services (or reproductive health) and infertility services

Advantages of two sites:

1. Allows you to market to two distinct audiences. If, for example, you have a fertility lab that is national in scope and a local infertility clinic, you might want to have two sites. Each service can focus on two separate audiences, for example:
    
   • The infertility clinic can have a simple Domain Name for its own brochures, newspaper ads, etc. The lab can have its own Domain Name for separate brochures, newspaper ads, etc.
      
   • The infertility clinic and the lab can set up site keywords oriented toward their user bases.
      
2. Allows the possibility of getting more listings on Web directories (both free and paid listings).
    
3. You can merge or separate the businesses much easier.
    
4. Each site does not bump into the other site.  If they are separate businesses, then each one gets its control of its site.
    
5. Each site can have its own identity. For example, each site can have its own navigation bar with links that are only for that site.
    
6. Each site will look more like an expert to the users who review the sites. For example, if you offer women's health and infertility services, by having the infertility site separate from the women's health services, the infertility site will show you as experts in infertility services. You can avoid patients thinking that your infertility services are only an add-on service.

Disadvantages of two sites:

1. If you have high rankings in search engines from the first site, then the second site would have to work hard to also get its high search engine rankings.  The second site could not ride the coattails of the popularity of the first site.
    
2. If you need to keep one overall branding look. However, this is not that critical of a factor because the two site can be made to have similar branding, if need be. For example, you can use similar logos on each site.
    
3. It will cost a little more money to develop two sites, rather than one site. However, the additional cost can be significantly reduced if the developer uses the first site as a template for the second site, then changes some parameters (e.g. colors/images) to give the second site a different look-and-feel. The cost of a second Domain Name is negligible.