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Blogs and Branded House v. House of Brands

Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006

According to point 8 of Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, October 17, 2005: (Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes) I should focus my blogging on one topic. I can see his point and he is a world renowned expert. However if you have more than one interest that way madness lies. If I followed this rule I’d need separate blogs for:

  1. Writing
  2. My life (sorry I’m not going to stop posting about it)
  3. Computer Graphics
  4. Gaming
  5. Marketing
  6. Random Reviews

In fact I’d need to split some of these into several sub-sub-blogs for specialist topics. This would result in me having many infrequently updated blogs which would also not be good (see point 7 of his list).

In some ways this echoes what marketing people working with brand architects call the Branded House v House of Brands debate. It comes down to is it more cost effective to group many things under one heading done well (as for example Tesco’s do) against having lots of things under different brands that all take time to develop and maintain (like Unilever) the former takes more work to start with but the later takes a lot more work down the line.

Since I’m inherently lazy I don’t intend to develop and maintain lots of different brands or blogs or web sites for my different interests. I am ultimately the brand and I’m complex 😉

My solution is that I need to make sure I provide new content for each of my blog’s audiences regularly and make sure visitors can find the bits of interest to them easily. The second of these objectives means adding to my blog’s navigation – that’s why I’ve added the new navigation on the left that goes to navigation posts that link back to blog articles. Hopefully nice and easy to follow. I’ve set two up for now and I’ll add more as I have time

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