: Best way to lay-out the website when sections of it are almost identical so, I have a minisite for the mobile application that I did. The mobile application is a public transport (transit)

@Sent6035632

Create one website at yoursite.com/ and serve the same template with different content based on the city they choose.

The homepage could welcome visitors and prompt them to choose a city or attempt to discover it automatically with the HTML5 geolocation API, then redirect them to yoursite.com/city Have a look at how other location-based services like Gowalla and Foursquare handle the user experience for first-timers.

Once the visitor's chosen their city, you'd load the city info into your template, changing the header, background, and city data as necessary.

This makes much more sense to me than attempting to manage a growing number of almost identical websites spread across multiple subdirectories with duplicate templates and stylesheets. Managing multiple sites as the number of cities you offer grows would be a pain. The whole point of a dynamic website is that it reduces your maintenance overhead by feeding dynamic data into one template, so take advantage of this.

Regarding duplicate content and search engines, simply make your content as unique as possible for each city, which shouldn't be hard for a city transport guide -- few cities offer identical services at identical times. You won't be penalised for using one template if the content itself is different.

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@Rivera981

I'm going to start with an assumption that this is for smartphones, which have the ability to be found via gps. That being said, the best way would be to have one site and use that phones geolocation to load up the appropriate data. (EG, You'd have all of your data in your document root and you'd look up the necessary db entries based on that.)

However, let's now assume you can't do that. The best layout would be to use either subdomains or as you've suggested duplicating the website and having them under separate folders. Use a main stylesheet on the root domain to cut down on overall size. Or you can have 1 main site, where they initially select their city and it sets their session data to be for city xyz and you just query the db for the data for that particular city.

You shouldn't be getting hits on duplicate data though. Some of your content will be the same, but for that content, why not (and I loathe to even suggest this) throw it into an iframe or set a cookie to determine which city they were looking at and then you'll have to redirect them back to where they were supposed to be in the first place.

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