All the rage right now is for "Silo Sites", it's been done to death and has been known about since the early days of HTML coding. How many of us have made a subsection of a website, and placed it inside a folder?
What these are is basically a number of "self contained websites under 1 umbrella domain name, like this;

• mygreatfootballsite.com
• MLS {mygreatfootballsite.com/mls/}
• LA Galaxy {mygreatfootballsite.com/mls/lagalaxy/}
• New England Revolution {mygreatfootballsite.com/mls/ner/}
• Premiership {mygreatfootballsite.com/premiership/}
• Liverpool {mygreatfootballsite.com/premiership/lfc/}
• Tottenham {mygreatfootballsite.com/premiership/thfc/}
• Primera Liga {mygreatfootballsite.com/primera/}
• Real Madrid {mygreatfootballsite.com/primera/real/}

And so on, and forth. It's pretty much how the permalinks work in WordPress (when you have pretty permalinks turned on, that is)…

Each folder (or sub-folder) is termed a "silo" and these are used intelligently. Eg, "tottenham" might not link to "new england revolution", but "real madrid" might well link to "la galaxy" (due to the David Beckham factor). I'm sure you get the idea behind silo's and linking structure…

Bring this into the fold

My task over the past few days has been to think up a way to do this (easily) within my Site Building program.

The problem is that the way that my sites are built, the menu's, rss feed etc all auto-update (which is a major selling feature of my software) – hence, if pages are placed into folders (in the example above, lfc pages would be in /public_html/premiership/lfc), these pages are not included in any of the menu's. In addition, these pages are outside the scope of the software, as such problems are caused, such as "loss of style".

In my opinion, anyone using my software to create silo sites need only create a full site for each folder – in this way the sites are all seperate, yet are themed. It only takes a few moments and is something that I consider to be a really very simple and highly effective solution. It ain't rocket science…

But, of course, that's just too simple for some users

So, I've come up with the THEORY of how to do this using some PHP jiggery-pokery. Of course, what would work well in theory rarely works when put into practice.

So, that'll be my task over the coming weeks – try to put my ideas into a workable solution. Even though I consider it a pointless waste of time, and I consider that silo-ing is a pointless waste of time also, I'll still do it, as it's a challenge.

Why do I consider silo'ing to be a pointless waste of time?

Because I would be using seperate domains for each "silo" – with a bigger portfolio, comes more chance of interlinking, selling sites, adding extra monetisation streams and so on.

What's the real problem?

The problem here is Internet Marketers (aka Guru's) who really don't know their arse from their elbow when it comes to laying out websites for SEO, semantics, readability and usability. They come up with good sounding catch-words and then all the sycophants have to have this "new style of website". Ho hum.