Splitting website vs 2 separate websites question?

[Ben_Gunn]

Hi Folks

I am hoping someone can help with this question.

I have started working at a company, they have a wholesale section targeting retailers. They also have a purchasing section which is targeted at suppliers. I am redoing their web presence - it's currently all lumped into 1 website which makes the offerings quite vague and confusing anyway.

For these 2 user personas these are 2 different optimizations really, I am wondering about the best practice here. Would you recommend splitting one website into subdomains?

Or, I was thinking maybe we should just have a 1 page on the main company domain, pointing to 2 separate individual sites for each side on their own domains, optimized appropriately? Or something else?

If anyone could point me in the right direction I would really appreciate it.

Thanks for your assistance.