One or Two HubPages accounts? Seeing Double

I’d thought about it before, about creating two subdomains for the two different types of hubs I write. It’s not because I’m a Gemini, although come to think of it, maybe it is indirectly.

On one hand, I write hubs on cooking, decorating, travel and my country of adoption: France. It’s fun, and part of the reason I signed up was to have some fun with writing. On the other hand, I’ve got hubs on nature and environment-related topics, which are to some degree an extension of the scientific vulgarization I do as an off-line writer and translator. I want to be sure my clients can easily find the latter, and I didn't feel that was the case.

In addition, soon after I started writing hubs it occurred to me that some of the vegetarians who read my nature hubs might be offended (no doubt rightly so) to find a lamb-stuffed breadloaf recipe alongside the video of wild alpine ibex that won me the 2012 hubbie award for most awesome hub. Similarly, folks who would otherwise enjoy my recipes might not find an article on sexual selection in peacocks (forthcoming) to their “taste.” I got to thinking it might be a good idea to separate topics by niches or at least families of niches.

I can already see how having two accounts could create dilemmas. For instance, would I put a hub about why I avoid eating tuna under the food/decorating account or the nature/environment account? And where does my recently plagiarized hub on the St. Tropez Butterfly Museum fit in?

For a while, the complexity of splitting up hubs was dissuasion enough to keep me from doing it. Besides, I like having all that variety in one place, and I see other hub authors who do a wonderful job of combining food and nature topics.

Then came the new HubPages profile design. It’s cute as a bug (or rather a spider, my favorite being jumping spiders, no joke, see right). But it only lists the most recent hubs and therefore doesn’t give an accurate overview of the variety of hubs an author writes.

For instance, during the HubPages cookbook contest (really fun, you should try it next time), all I wrote for a whole month was recipe hubs. If I’d had the new profile page at the time, all anyone who visited it would have seen were recipes. Plus, I have a whole bunch more waiting to go. That’s fine and dandy if someone discovers my profile page because they like a recipe and wanted to look for more. But what about someone who landed there from my hub on the reintroduction of European vultures?

Granted, the new profile page has the nifty featured hub slideshow. I could, for instance, feature 2 recipes, 2 nature & 2 travel hubs. But on Internet all decisions to look further are made at first glance. Will people have time to guess that the “Show” button actually means “By Category?” Will clients?

I did have a reassuring conversation with Relache during her stay in Paris. She took a philosophic approach to the profile change, not surprising for someone who dabbles in alchemy, the art of reaching for perfection in all things. In her matter of fact way, she said she figured the team at HubPages knew what they were doing, and since there wasn’t much we could do about it anyway, we might as well roll with it or split. So split is what I decided to do, though not in the sense she meant it.

At last I decided to create a second HubPages account: Letitialicious. As you may have guessed, Letitialicious focuses on recipes and decorating, my hobbies. I may gradually transfer all of my recipe and decorating hubs over to it. LetitiaFT will continue to reflect my professional interests, i.e. natural history. The idea is to split travel and France up between the two with, for instance, the Monaco Aquarium remaining under LetitiaFT and a hub on where to buy gifts in Paris (forthcoming) under Letitialicious. Another possibility would be to simply put recipes on Letitialicious, and all the rest on LetitiaFT.

I need to decide for sure before it’s too late to turn back. Plus, I have a plethora of recipes waiting to go and I don’t want to publish them before I’ve made that decision. Double plus, it’s holding me back on my 30 hub challenge!

So I’d love to hear from people who have more than one account, or simply an opinion about splitting up hubs. Especially, I’d like to know why.