Blog/Shop/Forum site structure - are we right to make these changes?

[DWJames]

We run a fairly large online community with a popular blog and Europe's largest online shop for drift-specific motor sport parts and our website has been around since 2004 I believe. Since it was launched, the blog (or previous CMS system) has been at the domain root, the forums have been located at /forum and the shop at /shop (or similar) but we have decided to move things around a bit and would like some comments as to whether we are doing the right thing or if you would make any addition or different changes to us.

Currently the entire website gets around 3m page views per month from 500,000 visitors, but this is split roughly 75% to the forums, 10% to the shop and 15% to the blog (but remember the blog is at the root so anyone who visits our homepage "visits" the blog).

We plan to move the shop to the domain root (since the shop provides the income for the business - surely it should be the 1st thing visitors see?), the blog from root to /blog and the forums will stay where they are at /forum.

We have read Steven Macdonald's post here, and have taken notes to help minimize traffic loss and disruption to our army of users and hopefully avoid too many penalties from Google and plan to:

• 301 redirect old URLs to new ones where they have changed.
• Submit new site maps to search engines.
• Update old links where we have control (such as forums where we are paid traders etc.).
• Send out a newsletter to our subscribers.
• Update our forum members.
• Fix errors via WMT before and after the re-structure.

Should we be taking this opportunity to actually set each of the three sections of the site to it's own sub domain? Our thoughts are that if we are disrupting things, it's surely best to have lots of disruption once rather than a little bit of disruption several times over a 3-6 month period?

OSE shows us to have roughly 1500 inbound links to /shop, 2100 to /forum and 4800 to the root / - if we proceed with our plan and put 301 redirects in place this seems to be the best plan to retain the value of these links but if we were to switch to sub domains would the 301s lose most of the link values due to them being on "different" domains?

Any help, advise or suggestions are very welcome but comments from experience are what we are seeking ideally!

Thanks

Jay

[matbennett]

Ah, yes that does change things a bit!  In that case go back to your first post and do what it there.  I'd agree that if you are changing the store anyway then having that as the root make sense.  Your checklist is pretty good.  I'd add "build new links to the new categories" too.

However I still think that the key to success for a site like your is getting the content closer to the product. You need to get the stock next to your content, where as it sounds like you are doing the opposite (putting content in to the shop).  That is OK if it is supporting the sales process, but try to think of everything flowing towards the shop not aware from it.

Sounds like interesting times.

[DWJames]

Thanks again Mat,

Another thing I should have mentioned (we have lots of project on the go right now!) is that we are redesigning the shop and at the point we are changing our URL structure we are also launching an updated version of the shop  software (latest version of Magento - to help with internal admin issues) along with a new theme for the shop itself. Our shop has around 25,000 customers and we are using Magento's features to reduce our product page count from 35,000 to around 1,000 (thanks to Bundle and Configurable products) to reduce the number of similar pages per fitment etc.

The new shop theme (which will also incorporate our new home page) will feature content from the blog and forum - but is based around the shop.

I like some of your ideas in terms of linking to shop categories at the end of blog posts for related products.

We have a system in place (although currently disabled) that displays adverts on the forum from the shop based on keywords picked up in threads - the system is currently being refined at the moment.

[matbennett]

I thought that must be what you were aiming for (because it certainly looks like a huge opportunity).  I don't know whether changing the URL structure is going to help you though.

If I were working on it my ideal solution  would be to rebuild on an integrated platform that could blend the 3 parts of the site using a common architecture. My choice would be drupal + drupal commerce.  I'd build a common vocabulary (taxonomy) that was used for dsicussions, articles and stock items so that if users were having a discussion about tuning a Nissan 200sx then they'd see the top selling tuning components for that car. Likewise I'd be tying profiles back to the store (my ride) and articles back to it too.

However ideal solutions aren't cheap and you probably didn't come here looking for ways to blow 5-figure sums!

As the other end of the scale I'd be looking at what specific changes would help you hit those two goals: Better crawling of the shop. More users in the shop. There are probably some cheap easy wins there:

Home  page : Spend some money on getting that right. Treat it as your website homepage not yourblog home page. Get recently added products, best sellers etc up on that page and link in to the blog less.  Even if you have to manually edit it once a week that will probably be a win.

Blog: Get in the habit of ending blog posts with a related list - just link in to relevant categories of the shop. Keep the users and the link equity flowing.

Forum: Harder. You have the category block on the forum home page, but stats from forums I run suggest most people hardly use that page and don't scroll down much on it.  Most come in and just hit "new posts" a lot.  You could looking at some of the add-ons that let you have sponsored sections in forums and use these to run internal adverts related to each category.  The tricky would be to change them frequently to stop ad blindness. Maybe mix them up with occasional big offers for members to help "train" them to look out for adverts.

I'd also look at the menu. Consider 'demoting' some items to make sure everyone knows it is shop + blog + forum. Sub menus for the shop categories would help make it easier to access the store and also help with deeper indexing.

I could go on all day. Can you tell I like the site ?

[DWJames]

Thanks for your reply Mat, I guess I should have been a bit more specific with the project!

The goal is to get more of our site visitors to view the shop, and increase awareness of the products we supply. Currently the blog makes us no money, and since the majority of visitors (to articles not the homepage) come via other source such as Facebook and other back-links it doesn't seem right to me to have the shop "tucked away out back" when it should be in the shop window. The blog to me is the 3rd most valuable of the 3 sections on our site - with the shop 1st and the forums 2nd, so the plan is to re-arrange things to ensure the most important asset is the one you are presented with on our homepage.

Part of the goal is to ensure that Google crawls more of the shop products and that more of our back-links add to our product/category rankings on our shop since currently lots of our incoming links are just to driftworks.com (i.e. the blog)  this value could be put to better use! I think...?

[matbennett]

Nice project. It sounds daft, but what are you actually trying to achieve?

Looking at your home page it is only really a visit to the blog as you call it that. It's a stand alone page with a bit of everything anyway.  What do you want to achieve that you can't do with a home page redesign?

I'm going to presume that somewhere in the mix the aim is to get more of that traffic spending money.

Forums are a tricky one.  People tend to use packaged forum products that feels distinct from the rest of the site (vbulletin in your case) - which encourages people to just use the forum and ignore the bits of the site that actually make money.  I'm tackling that issue on a site at the moment.

Moving to subdomains would probably encourage that if anything.  If that were my project I'd be looking to make the 3 parts more integrated not less. That way those who come for the community aspect wouldn't be tucked away in their own area away from all the good money making stuff!

Couple of examples: You are using tags on the blog but these don't tie back in to shop categories or products. Likewise you have discussion on blog posts, but these don't relate to the forum.  I'd be trying to blur the line between all three elements as much as possible.

I don't think I have answered your specific question, but I am struggling to get what the aim is, sorry.