Has your website designer or administrator suggested a microsite for your business? Have you asked for time to rethink before you say yes? If yes, then you are in right place. Before giving consent to this style of website you must consider a few things about the nuances of a microsite design.
What is a Microsite
A microsite is a special kind of website design that keeps it compact and specific for a defined activity. A microsite is defined as a single web page or a minimal collection of web pages. This group of pages exists as an independent entity or as a section in an organization’s big website. Usually, it works as an online representative of an offline business. A microsite may contain a home page or index page as a sub-domain of a website representing a bigger business. It can be an independent URL but with a much-reduced size and functionality.
Examples of Microsites
Dominos Pizza
I have experience with creating microsites for my clients whose need made me suggest this detour from their original path of website design. A few clients demanded a main website for their core business but a small blog to be created as a microsite which should be independent while having a link on the main business site. A college needing a limited web interface for its ex students to get themselves registered and express their views on an online forum is another practical aspect of microsite.
So considering the main question, Is a microsite worth your business? Can it suit the needs of your esteemed customers? Here are some pointers that will help you in taking the right decision.
Things to consider when designing a Microsite for business
Can your business be correctly represented by a microsite?
Any thing you do for your business must be able to convert your efforts into business value. It is true about a website as well- whose sole purpose is to bring high count of visitors and convert these visits into business prospects.
If your core business is offline and your online presence is just to extend the information about services and products which again are limited in count, then a microsite is a good choice. It will limit the extensive efforts of website design and subsequent maintenance. Small but focused content is the key to an impressive and successful microsite.
Persuasive Content
If the above question has a positive response then content for a microsite is the next important thing to consider. After a niche is decided content creation is a very tricky process since it is going to be very limited in quantity. It must rate very high in quality.
Your visitors must immediately get what they came looking for. To make their stay longer on the microsite and revisit, you should hire the smartest content writers to create clever, neat and engaging content embedded with apt images and multimedia elements. It has to be highly informative and useful for the visitors.
Competency of a microsite lies in the clarity and effectiveness of the content. You must offer easy interaction to your visitors be providing many options to chose from rather them make them type. The interactive interface must gel seamlessly with the rest of content and web design as a whole.
Matching Design with goals
Sine a microsite is small as far as content and function is concerned so make sure that it fulfills the specific purpose that must be evident with its eye-catching presentation. A microsite design should be un-complicated. A complex web design may not justify the task assigned to the microsite. It can compromise on extreme and graphical detailing but must be a working and practical solution to a precise business activity.
Connect with Main website
A microsite may seem to be a support system and a sub-task for a bigger website. Even if it is designed and created to do this specific work, it must associate with the parent site. The visitors should be able to reach it from parent website and go back to parent website if needed.
Final Words
In the aim of creating minimal and focused content the website designers must understand needs of business owners asking for a microsite. Businesses who decide to go for microsites must understand that a microsite is not a full-fledged web-space. It is limited in content as well as benefits. You must plan a microsite only if a big website is too much to create and manage.
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