Why Business Sites Should NEVER Consolidate all their Webs into a single domain

The trend in web sites by big companies to combine all sites into one single domain and have the people who are looking for manuals, a problem solution to be magically and transparently moved from the tech resource site onto the selling site without telling people. They only know it when a shopping cart shows up asking them to buy something when they were looking for an answer to a technical question.

 

Now another reason why they should never do that is that almost EVERY corporate level web filter program sees the WHOLE site as a SHOPPING SITE.

 

This means if you are a user at a corporate location and want to find a manual to fix your Gateway system - THE WHOLE SITE is blocked since Gateway domain sells computers so the web filter system sees it is a shopping site so everything is blocked - NO WEB SUPPORT.

 

This means you now have to fight the IT - and cyber people are paranoid and actually DO NOT care at all if you work can get done since they are out to protect the business regardless if their policies stops your work -- there is NO appeal of their dictates - to try and prove to them that you only want the manuals and driver updates from the site and you are not going to spend 8 hours shopping for your 509th PC to buy today.

 

Separating out support from shopping also allows PEOPLE to easily know where things are at spatially in their minds and so they know that going to support.business.com keeps them ON the site where tech info is at and the search results (most sites have LOUSY navigation since they user their INTERNAL names to classify items and not what people use.) are not contaminated with selling brochures and marketing hype that does not help a person SOLVE a problem that they went there to find - HP.com is notorious for doing this - you look for a manual and you end up on their selling site asking you if you want that delivered to you business and what credit card to use when looking for the manual to configure the IP on a printer port. And their are not alone - Epson.com does this a lot too.

 

Thus these companies are being blocked as a tech resource since they want to have a "one company look and feel" for everything and everything on a single site. This also makes it MUCH harder for a person to know where things are on their site - everything looks alike.

 

So the next time you try and get a manual and the site comes up blocked thank a cyber person and some marketing "expert" who told the company that you want the whole company web site to be one seamless look for branding reasons and to push everyone to the checkout line regardless of what they are looking for.