I have a site for my business that has multiple physical locations that have online booking for each location. Right now we basically have separate websites that look very similar for each location (except for some content) with separate domains [URLs redacted]. Is this what you meant by homogenous websites? If WPMU ins’t a good option, can you steer me in the right direction for how you would design this type of site?
Yes. That’s pretty much exactly what I mean when I call a site “homogenous.”
You can’t see it, but each URL I removed had identical design. Same layout, pretty much the same splash page.
When I talk about ‘sameness’ with websites, I really do mean exactly this. Each site on the network has the same information, the same about page, and actually pretty much the same everything except for the booking page.
Right now, each site has a locationdomain.com/book-now URL. Without looking at the code, I’m going to guess that the book-now pages are inserts. Either templates or shortcodes, but something that doesn’t need to be on the domain URL to be unique. Just some content in the page.
And I would have maindomain.com/book-location Or better still maindomain.com/location/LOCATION/book
That second example looks weird, I know. You see, I’d do it with Custom Post Types for each location. My CPTs would be pages and their slug would be /location/. Then each page would be LOCATION, giving me URL formats like /location/lexington/ and so on.
My thought process is that if the majority of the content of each site is the same, and the design of all sites are the same, then I don’t need a multisite unless there’s a specific need to silo data.
There are very few cases, in a homogenous network, where you need to silo data. Exceptions are pretty much all based on legal requirements.
And if you have a song in your head, here it is:
