I'm about to start work on my website for various I.T Services I will be offering. I will be offering the following services;

 

Application Development (programming services)

Graphics Design Dervices

I.T Consultancy (business)

Computer Support (for home users)

 

I really wanted to put these under one website, and being that Im new to web design I've decided to go for a pre purchased template. Probably from template Monster or the like.

 

The quandry I have is that no one theme really fits all of the above, and I really wanted to avoid having 4 seperate web-sites.

 

So my question is this; Is it acceptable (or good practice), to have my main website www.mydomain.com using one theme, my graphics design section using another theme, computer support section using another theme etc etc.

 

To the user I guess it might look like seperate website, which I'm not sure is a good thing or not. But in terms of promoting the business it would be a heck of a lot easier to just have one website with sub-sections.

 

So what Im thinking would look something like;

 

www.mydomain.com

www.mydomain.com/computersupport

www.mydomain.com/graphicdesign

www.mydomain.com/itconsultants

www.mydomain.com/computersupport

 

The mydomain.com homepage will simply be a breif overview of the company, listing the services, with 4 big links to each of the sub-sections.

 

The sub-sections will all look hugely different, for example the graphic design section will be very arty with a lot of images and colours, but the helpdesk section will be very simple, fresh a minimilist.

 

I'd really appreciate your expert opinions on this, and if perhaps anyone has any suggestions to how I could perhaps do things better.

 

Thank guys

It would highly come down to preference of yourself and a couple of questions you will need to answer.

 

Are you looking to build a core company brand which a customer can recognise if they see one service or the other?

 

Would you look to be cross selling at all in which case one core brand would probably be a good idea?

 

Are you trying to run them as completely seperate business to potentially look at dropping whichever ones do not succeed as much as the others (if any ) ?

 

Generally keeping the same feel and branding for one company is a good idea I mean if you look at the amount of products Adobe have, you can always recognise one of their logo's.

 

It does come down to yourself, I hope I have been helpful in some way, good luck!

 

P.S You can always have a nice big subheader which clearly defines which service the customer is currently viewing.

 

 

P.S You can always have a nice big subheader which clearly defines which service the customer is currently viewing.

 

I guess my whole reason for this approach is that I'm not a webdesigner, and customizing any one template to meet all the requirments of the sub-sections is going to be nigh on impossible. For example the software devlopment templates I have looked at are almost ideal for what I want in terms of advertising software develiopment. However, they are nowhere near what is required for my graphics design section, which I want to have a flash image banner with a rotation of my portfolio images. Customizing one theme to match all these requirments would require some serious web-design skills, as well as an artistic understanding of web-layout (whcih I don't think I have).

 

I can see what your saying in terms of customer shopping experinece.

 

What about if I went for 4 templates with very similar colour's and obviously utilizing my own logo as much as possible?