At Honeywell we consolidated about 300 websites into 13. The work was content studies, transformation rubrics, and a large taxonomy project, in that order.
How does a company end up with hundreds of websites?
One launch, one acquisition, and one regional team at a time. Every product line, campaign, and country got its own site because it was faster than asking the main site's team. Nobody turned the old ones off, so the company pays to host, secure, and update sites that nobody owns and that compete with each other in search.
How do we decide which sites to keep?
Score every site against the same rubric, so the decision is not a vote between departments.
- Who it serves. Buyers, distributors, installers, job seekers, investors.
- What it earns. Traffic, leads, orders, and support calls it prevents.
- What it costs. Hosting, licenses, the people who update it, and the security risk of an unpatched site.
- Who owns it. A site with no owner is the first candidate to merge.
- What only it has. Documents, tools, or content that exist nowhere else.
The rubric turns three hundred arguments into one spreadsheet everyone can read.
How should the new sites be organized?
By the audience and the job they came to do, not by the org chart. A distributor looking for a spec sheet should not need to know which division makes the product. That is where the taxonomy work comes in: one set of categories and names for products, documents, and industries, tested with the people who use them before the content moves.
What happens to the content on the sites we close?
Most of it gets cut, some gets rewritten, and the rest moves. Content studies find out which pages people use, which ones answer questions, and which exist only because a site needed pages. Every page that moves or closes gets a redirect to the closest new page, so links from distributors, search engines, and AI assistants still land somewhere useful.
How long does a consolidation take, and what does it cost?
A rubric and an inventory take weeks; a full consolidation runs in waves over months, with the highest-cost and lowest-value sites first. A one-hour second opinion on your plan is $150. The research, rubric, and taxonomy run as a fixed study price, and leading the program for a stretch is priced monthly by the day. Anything over $3,000 can be paid by the month.
Answered by Jared Lukes, Minneapolis. Twenty-five years in brand, UX, and technology, currently holding fractional AI and technology seats at three companies. About Jared.