WEBSITE HELP, WHAT TO DO ...........?

[fyneart]

what are your thoughts on the following dilemma.

a website for a car mechanic is to expand its product line, they want to keep the same website but to extend it to sell 2 other lines that are barely related.

he wants to sell custom made carbs and also to have a website for car restoration, old fords mainly.

he dose not want three sites or even two but to keep everything on the same site, i know i can just add a new index pages - repaircars/carbs and repaircars/restoration which is easy enough but after visiting the H&M (clothing retailer) site he has asked for a front page that has only 3 links, one to his existing car repair workshop, one to the custom carbs and one to the restoration side of the business, all three businesses will come under the same business name so no problems there but i wondered if he would lose his pagerank of 4 as the front page of the site will not be the existing page but be this new portal type page, if its a good idea (it does make sense) or if it will actually cause him dearly in the search engines as there is no point in hurting his existing website of 4 years. ???????????

any thoughts appreciated.

[gwpriester]

Can you rebuild his site to be one site. You can reuse his existing site material and basically recreate it in a new document as explained in this Guest Tutorial. This will save a lot of work in the long run because it will be easier to link the pages and you will have more control over the entire site.

[fyneart]

yes he would like me to do it with web designer, just not sure about the front door being a page with no content but basically just three buttons to guide customers to the correct pages within the site.

unless i can call it something different than 'index' which is what his existing is called and which is well listed in google etc. but it must be the first page of his site

[James Allen]

If a brand is a household name, they can sometimes afford to make their homepage extremely simple.

www.bmw.com for instance.

Even then it is the exception, not the rule. Most big company sites prefer to load their homepage up with info and links.

www.ford.com

www.harley-davidson.com

www.honda.com

It would be better to have helpful content on the homepage, especially if he is a small business.

[pauland]

he wants to sell custom made carbs and also to have a website for car restoration, old fords mainly.

Seems to me that the key here is the crossover between businesses. He may be running all three himself, but as a customer wanting my old Ford restored, I don't want to buy a carburettor or have a service.

I would run these as three seperate websites rather than confuse visitors and force them to have to make a second choice when they think they've already googled the right place. This won't upset his current ranking or business. He can cross-link the sites by having essentially a small link - like an advertising link. The links between seperate sites should even help his SEO.

[fyneart]

thanks folks, real good answers and food for thought