What is a microsite?
A microsite is a website with one subject. Where the main site has to explain the whole brand, a microsite does one thing: launches a product, carries a campaign, hosts an event, or tells a single story in more depth than one page could. It usually has its own look, its own navigation (or almost none) and its own address, whether that is a separate domain, a subdomain of the main one or a folder styled to feel like a world of its own.
Microsites were everywhere in the late 2000s, when campaign budgets bought a Flash experience and a launch party. The format has calmed down since, but the idea survives in product launch pages, annual reports, interactive documentaries and the small sites built around a film, a collaboration or a limited edition.
Why it matters
Why a microsite matters
A microsite gives an idea room that the main site cannot. The brand site has a navigation to respect, a template to fit and a dozen departments with a claim on the homepage; a microsite has none of those, so it can be designed entirely around the story. That freedom is useful when the story is bigger than a page, when the audience is different from the brand's usual one, or when two brands are collaborating and neither one's site is the right home. The cost is that everything a main site has built up, from search authority to returning visitors to a working analytics setup, starts again from zero.
In practice
How a microsite works in practice
- 01
We start by asking whether it should exist at all. If the content can live as a section of the main site, it usually should, because it inherits the traffic and the authority. When a microsite is right, it gets a sharp brief: one audience, one story, one action, and a date when it will be retired or folded back in. The design follows the campaign's world rather than the brand template, but the logo, the type and the way back to the main site stay recognizable.
- 02
Then it is built light and measured from day one. Campaign microsites take their traffic from ads, social and press, so they have to load instantly on a phone and record what visitors do. The plan for the end matters as much as the launch: when the campaign is over, the address redirects to the most relevant page on the main site rather than expiring into a dead link or, worse, a domain someone else buys.
Watch out
What people get wrong about microsites
Building one by default. A microsite for every launch splits the brand's search presence into a dozen weak sites instead of one strong one. Second, forgetting maintenance: an abandoned microsite with an expired certificate and a broken video is a worse advertisement than no site at all. Third, letting the domain lapse, so the campaign address that was printed on posters and packaging ends up pointing at somebody else's page. And judging it on its own visits alone, when the real question is usually how many of those visitors went on to the main site or bought the thing.
