How to maintain two websites with same style, different menu

[SolarLightCap]

I have two sites with similar style, but they have different menus and some different content. One is our corporate site and the other one of our products emcomeerce site

Some pages are the same content on both sites, but as I said, the menu is different.
www.2CLight.com
www.SolarLightCap.com

So should I try to manage them both from the one NOD file, use different NOD files in the same directory structure or split the whole thing off?

Ideally style changes and some pages would be shared so I can minimise page editing.

[franko]

Do them as two separate sites, each with its own nod. I sometimes recommend divvying up large sites into one or more sites in NoF for ease of maintenance. Remember that really there is no such thing as a web site per se. Each page is made up of a number of individual files which are called and displayed by the web browser. A web site is just a number of pages each of which is made up of a number of individual files. Those pages can, in fact, reside on one server under one domain or be distributed across multiple domains/servers. This was the whole idea behind hypertext in the first place (a concept which dates back to IBM researchers in the mid-60s). Tim Berners-Lee drew on this work when he wrote the initial proposal for a hypertext based document system in 1990 which evolved into what we today know as the world wide web.

If you think about it this way rather than thinking of a web site as a single entity, it allows you to plan your information architecture in a way that best suits the distribution of your documents rather than being confined by the constraints of a single application.

What you want to do is simple. Just set the same site style for both sites, rename them so they do not compromise the original site style using Duplicate Site Style and use absolute paths when referencing one web site from the other.

[SolarLightCap]

Thanks Frank. You say duplicate the styles to avoid problems but i wanted both sites to share the same style

[gotFusion]

Make a dup style from an original. Modify the duplicate. Apply the duplicate to both sites.

that way you are not modifying a stock style that you may use on a 3rd or 4th site that you DO NOT want to be the same as the other two.

More info on gotFusion: http://www.gotfusion.com/tutorials/tut.cfm?itemID=117

[dian11]

Thanks for this Frank