I'm combining my No CS sites

Soon after I launched my No CS Degree site in July 2019 I made a big mistake! Thinking that making separate sites for related projects would mean, correctly, I could launch lots more sites on Product Hunt, I made a separate job board on nocsok .com and a bootcamp directory on bootcampindex .com .

I got some advice from people at the time saying this was smart but I actually think it was really dumb.

Three sites = bad branding

First of all, the design to each site was no different so it was confusing for the user. They had no real way that the sites were owned by the same person. This was really bad branding.  I can see now that a person may well think No CS Degree and No CS OK were competitors perhaps. No CS Degree is a great name! No CS OK is a bad name  - is it ok or okay? It's definitely not catchy.

Three sites = bad SEO

The bigger problem though was SEO. I had three related sites that were effectively competing with each other in Google's search rankings. Not smart. Instead of having one really strong website for SEO, I had one ok website and two quite weak ones. The job board did surprisingly well in terms of keywords but the design and page speed was really weak and embarrassing. I'm sure it put off advertisers.

Better late than never

So I'm now in the processing of combining my sites under the one website, No CS Degree. The job boards has moved from No CS OK (not a great name!) to https://www.nocsdegree.com/jobs/. The bootcamp directory will be the next thing I move. I've also put a small courses directory of coding courses on to https://www.nocsdegree.com/courses/. And any future side projects in this space I'll obviously put on the No CS Degree domain.

Advising others

In my High Signal community recently I was able to help one of our entrepreneurs, Rónán by suggesting he combine his many sites into one strong one, just like I've started to do. He has a number of different language learning groups e.g. Deutsch Gym, French Gym etc etc. He owned the LanguageGym.com domain so I suggested he moved everything there and then do a 301 re-direct so Deutsch Gym now points to languagegym/german which is smarter I reckon.

Conclusion

If you are going to make side projects, keep them all on the same domain by using sub page e.g. nocsdegree/jobs - don't make a whole new site!