If I were to amplify any of these, it would be the point about organisational scale, and the control issues that come with this. You touch on it in the ‘ownership’ and ‘hassle’ sections – but there’s more perhaps to this than simply the ownership issue of any individual area.

When organisations – and channels – exceed a certain size their very scale and complexity make clear and fast decisions extremely difficult. This is something that’s always faced in an organisation growth model – often the hardest thing to overcome in the longer term; as formal governance structures struggle to keep up with the speed and flexibility of control required.

@paul_clarke

I had a lot of experience in local gov (LG) in parrying these requests, thankfully I got the backing early on in my career of our web management group to keep all websites under the main umbrella.

Your points;

1 It’s not about strong corporate branding:

I too used the BBC as the example to win my arguments. I found that the main corporate “surrounding framing” (largely headers and footers, but sidebars and navbars) had to be visually “sent to into the background” and it was quite a trick to find the balance between being strong enough to stamp a corporate look, yet bland enough to support, and not clash with a bright green recycling template, multicolored childrens templates on another part of the site.

I’d say to anyone going down the same road for them study the BBC site carefully first, and come up with a “corporate framing” they can sell internally.

2 It’s not about a monster CMS:

If you’ve bought into the one CMS for all solution, and have not left doors open to create your own applications, well you are goosed anyway.

6 It’s about the package:

Much as the previous point really, if you don’t have the wherewithall to be able to bend your IT to suit your (internal) clients then it is natural that the site will fragment into microsites.

In fact the plethora of microsites in local government over the years are testimony to the overall failure of web teams (pre-ordained to fail by committees spending cash on IT structures they barely understand), and are an anti-pattern in their own right.

The other point I would make is the SEO argument – that can be blown out of the water at any moment, how can a brand new domain compete with probably 10 years of SEO history of your main domain?

I also used to throw into this argument all the ways I was able to cross link internally to the new section, how we could build links to it from other sections’ news, articles, faqs, how this owner could do an “internal sales job” and pressurise others working on the site to provide links to this new section.

This is especially true in LG where locally after 10 years of good SEO you have already dominated searches for local names (or should be the case).