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I am working with a chain of martial arts schools. I created a template for one of the child schools several years ago and was then asked to make a template all the child schools could use. When I created the new site I put the school on a multisite, thinking I could move the first school over to the multisite and they could share the same template. However every new school that signs up is reexplaining the same styles we practice etc. Which is a duplication of content. I didn’t create the headquarter (HQ) site. They have a wordpress site and a lot more content etc. However, they are looking for me to create a template similar to the other schools.

Some things the HQ school is asking for:

Children schools should have the content or links to the content that the HQ school has.
If a child school is uploading videos or articles to the site, the other child schools should have a link to those videos/articles on their site
I think if you’re on the parent site they’d like to be able to see all the videos and articles for all the sites and probably search them as well.
My thought:
Originally I was thinking that I could set up a multisite with the parent as the main site and then all the child sites as regular sites on the multisite. Then somehow be able to show the content from the network across the sites.

Option 1
I’m wondering now if this would be better as one site rather than a multisite….that is including the children sites as landing pages within the parent site. I could have the HQ site supply all the content as far as explanation of styles etc. The HQ site has a location page right now listing their locations. But I’m thinking rather than that, I could design a landing page for each of the schools that has that schools logo, instructor, hours, videos and articles they uploaded. Then the parent site would have a videos and articles section that would show all of the videos from the sites.

Option 2
Do the same as above, but set it up in a multisite. The child sites would just have a template that is wrapped within the HQ site so they look like it’s one site. I don’t know if it would hurt the SEO for those sites because technically all the explaining of the styles etc would be on the parent site. So, if they don’t create any articles and don’t have much content. I’m not sure if they will do well in the search engines?

Option 3
Keep them as separate sites as they are now, but on the multisite network with the same content and some how share videos from across the network with the sites. Is this even a good option?

Right now, the sites have their own http://www.domainname.com as well. I’m thinking they may want to use that as well.

Anyone have any good advice? I could really use some.

Thanks!