Professional corporate website development
in Austin

Groups grow by acquisition, by spinning up new units, by buying a brand and keeping its name. The corporate site then has to present a parent company and several businesses that each have their own customers. Getting the structure wrong confuses everyone who lands there.

Start with the question the visitor brings. An investor wants the group. A job seeker may want one business. A customer almost always wants the one brand they already know, and may not know the parent exists. The site has to serve all three without making the customer read a history of the group first.

There are three common models. In the first, the corporate site is only about the parent, and each business has its own site. The group site links out with a short card per company. In the second, the corporate site hosts a section for every business under one design. In the third, the businesses share the brand fully and appear as divisions.

Each model has a cost. Separate sites mean separate hosting, updates and designs, and they drift apart. A single site with sections means every business follows one release schedule and one content team. Divisions under one brand only work when the group really operates as one company.

Whichever model you choose, a few pages are needed at group level. Leadership, governance, contact for press and investors, careers across the group, and legal notices that name the right entity. The last one causes trouble. A privacy notice or terms page must name the company that actually processes the data or sells the service, and that may be a subsidiary, not the parent.

Navigation needs one clear rule. From any business page, a visitor should reach the group in one step. From the group, a customer should reach their brand in one step. Mixed menus that list some businesses and hide others make the group look disorganised.

Search adds its own pressure. When the group site and a business site both describe the same product, they compete for the same queries. Decide which page owns each topic. The group page can summarise and link, while the business page carries the detail, the prices and the enquiry form.

Plan for change too. Businesses get sold. New ones arrive. A structure where each company is a template filled with content makes adding or removing one a matter of an afternoon, not a redesign.

A sale needs its own checklist. The departing business may keep its pages for a transition period, then redirect to its new owner. Its news items on the group site stay as history. Its logo leaves the footer on the day the deal closes.