Going global: multiple websites, singular strategy

Exploring the challenges for worldwide organisations in maintaining consistency across the web.

Online presence has become a vital component of nearly all modern marketing strategies. No matter what the scale, sector and scope of your organisation, you are very unlikely to be able to operate effectively without a website, an email marketing strategy or a social media channel or two.

Maintaining a clear and consistent online presence is challenging enough for a small business, but for large organisations it can become even more complicated.

Problems and pitfalls

Some may wonder why it matters. But what are the risks and problems associated with each company going to a separate web agency and having its site built and managed independently?

There are two major areas where potential pitfalls could lie: First, there’s the front- end design and content; for some groups, the branding can be totally different across each subsidiary, whereas for others, it is vital for every subsidiary’s site to have a unified look and feel.

The second pitfall is trickier to manage. When the back-ends for a group of websites are built and managed differently, it becomes far more difficult to correct inconsistencies between them. There’s also no central codebase and configuration for the group’s sites, which makes it very difficult to implement standard functionality such as single sign on authentication or sales CRM integration across the group.

Even more seriously, it becomes more difficult to fix problems with coding.

This can potentially create a security risk, and it can be a blow to the credibility of a large company if they fail to manage their subsidiaries and owned companies website to the same high standard as their main brand.

A systematic solution

On a small scale the answer can be as simple as employing a single agency to build all the websites for the group. However, for an organisation operating on a global scale it is not so easy. The systematic ethos followed by a single agency can still be emulated on a worldwide scale – it just requires the use of the same tool, rather than the same team.

A single quality assurance (QA) system can provide a centralised point from which all subsidiary companies and their contracted agencies can clone a template for their website, with pre-set architecture and security protocols baked in. The individual agency can then go on to design the site according to their branding guidelines and desired look and feel. Crucially, the website can then be tested and checked. If the quality score drops too low - deployment to a production environment can be blocked, unless overridden by authorised users.

Each website should be built using the same platform. Open source platforms such as Drupal are particularly powerful here, because they offer companies and web agencies greater flexibility while still providing underlying continuity and standardisation. For global organisations, it is particularly important to select global platforms for building web presences – and again, Drupal fits the bill.

This technology-driven approach, making use of an intelligent QA system, strikes the perfect balance between freedom and control. It simultaneously offers subsidiaries full control over design, while allowing the parent company to have full control over the application codebase, its security levels and its standardised content management (CMS) system.

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