Why do you have two websites?
- Thread starter Fredrow
- Start date
Originally the plan was Viking360.com for XBOX360 controllers and VikingPS3.com for PS3 controllers. Since our Viking360.com website cost us around $20,000, it seemed like a bad idea to continue building a new website each and every time we launched a new product.
So instead, I decided to start selling our new Ragnarok controllers on a new "e-commerce" shop that would allow us to list all our future products. VikingDigital.com was available, so I purchased it (instead of using say vikingcontrollers.com). To save money, I built the site myself. It launched a month ago, but no customers showed up. It turns out all our SEO brings in a lot of avid XBOX360 gamers to Viking360. So, we started a new SEO campaign to bring PS3 gamers to VikingDigital. While we are waiting for that SEO to start to take affect, we have put up a banner on the VikingForums that points to VikingDigital.com. We have also listed our basic PS3 controllers on the Viking360 website.
Lastly, our Viking360.com is running a custom-built wordpress-based shopping cart. The macro library, ticket syste, etc. everything was built from scratch by the website developer. It's going to take quite a lot of work to try to merge this with VikingDigital. Since we only have 300 macro controllers left, we are considering eventually leaving Viking360.com just the way it is, but remove all the "buy" buttons. So VikingDigital.com some day would become our shop, and Viking360.com would be left in place as a support site. Or maybe we'll merge the two. We're not sure.
Also, Viking360.com was custom-built to sell macro controllers. It's NOT very well suited for selling multiple products, nor is it suitable for selling "Combinations" of products, like our PS3 product configurator here:
http://www.vikingdigital.com/modded...ntrollers/custom-ps3-ragnarok-controller.html
So, we have two websites because we don't want to go spend a huge ton of money merging the two sites, and we have to be careful how we manage/merge the two sites because we could wipe out any and all SEO we have built up. So think of this is as a slow evolution where we are trying to move from Viking360.com to VikingDigital.com. Unfortunately we can't just 'throw thea switch' because we'd lose all our search engine rankings with google. So it's a slow process that could take from 6 months up to 18 months to complete depending on how things go.
Eventually some day we'll have one single e-commerce site that allows us to list all our Viking products.
So instead, I decided to start selling our new Ragnarok controllers on a new "e-commerce" shop that would allow us to list all our future products. VikingDigital.com was available, so I purchased it (instead of using say vikingcontrollers.com). To save money, I built the site myself. It launched a month ago, but no customers showed up. It turns out all our SEO brings in a lot of avid XBOX360 gamers to Viking360. So, we started a new SEO campaign to bring PS3 gamers to VikingDigital. While we are waiting for that SEO to start to take affect, we have put up a banner on the VikingForums that points to VikingDigital.com. We have also listed our basic PS3 controllers on the Viking360 website.
Lastly, our Viking360.com is running a custom-built wordpress-based shopping cart. The macro library, ticket syste, etc. everything was built from scratch by the website developer. It's going to take quite a lot of work to try to merge this with VikingDigital. Since we only have 300 macro controllers left, we are considering eventually leaving Viking360.com just the way it is, but remove all the "buy" buttons. So VikingDigital.com some day would become our shop, and Viking360.com would be left in place as a support site. Or maybe we'll merge the two. We're not sure.
Also, Viking360.com was custom-built to sell macro controllers. It's NOT very well suited for selling multiple products, nor is it suitable for selling "Combinations" of products, like our PS3 product configurator here:
http://www.vikingdigital.com/modded...ntrollers/custom-ps3-ragnarok-controller.html
So, we have two websites because we don't want to go spend a huge ton of money merging the two sites, and we have to be careful how we manage/merge the two sites because we could wipe out any and all SEO we have built up. So think of this is as a slow evolution where we are trying to move from Viking360.com to VikingDigital.com. Unfortunately we can't just 'throw thea switch' because we'd lose all our search engine rankings with google. So it's a slow process that could take from 6 months up to 18 months to complete depending on how things go.
Eventually some day we'll have one single e-commerce site that allows us to list all our Viking products.