I was recently in a conversation with a colleague who is revamping their client’s website. As he and I were talking, he asked an important question: if you have more than one topic, should you create more than one blog and should these blogs stand-alone or be part of the client’s website.

Lets take the example of a personal chef was wondering if it would be better to have one blog for wine, for example, and one for food on the new site he’s setting up. Keep in mind for the purpose of this discussion, my examples are geared towards the average small to medium business (including start-ups), though they can really be applied across the board

First off, I would advise him to keep it simple to begin with. In this case, divide and conquer does not apply. By creating two separate blogs, he would be:

1) Dividing his power;

2) Limiting the amount of content he will actually write. If you’re not used to writing all the time, its going to be challenging keeping just one blog updated, let alone two.

In this case, lets say he’s using Wordpress. He wanted to have two blogs, one devoted to wine and one to food. He should start out with one blog and have simple categories, e.g. Wine, Food. Or he could even have separate pages for each one.

After he’s got a larger audience and is used to blogging, he should think about installing Multi User Wordpress, which allows multiple blogs under one system. Thus he can have as many different blogs as he wants. I would reccommend this before telling him to create two separate blogs.

Once again, in multi-user, the blog (s) is part of the site, further pushing it. There are so many options available for people who set their sites up on content management systems like Wordpress there’s no reason not to use it. Easier than Joomla, more controllable than Blogger, Wordpress is the way to go, especially in a situation like this.