Microsites or Integrated Sites for Online Communities
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Oct 31, 2008
Kaprice asks, "Can your online community be a part of your website or should it be a microsite?"
To answer this question, I did a quick review of some prominent communities:
Since online communities have dedicated or part-time community managers, most organizations gravitate to having these managers responsible for the entire community web presence, which naturally lends itself to a microsite. Further, since Vovici and our competitors offer hosted communities, such communities are also most easily deployed as microsites.
Most home pages can do a better job linking to the community microsites. Some sites bury their communities a few links in. And, conversely, most community sites can do a better job linking back to the home site. The average community is a satellite in a distant orbit around their organization's main site.
The exception to all of this is Threadless, where the community is woven into the very fabric of the site. Threadless.com may indicate that, in the long term, online communities will be absorbed into organization's sites, permeating the site. For now, such community applications are highly customized and are the exception.