A holding company’s website carries an unusual burden. It has to explain a portfolio that may span media, energy, industry and finance; speak to investors and regulators with precision; give each operating company its own identity; and still read as one organization with one story. Most holding websites solve this with a list of logos and a hope. The better ones solve it with architecture.
The idea
Information architecture for a group is the decision about what is shared and what is separate — made deliberately, once, and then applied everywhere.
The group layer. Who the holding is, what it believes, how it is governed, how it performs, who leads it, how to reach it. This layer belongs to the group alone and should never be diluted with operating-company marketing.
The portfolio layer. The sectors and companies, structured as real entities with consistent attributes — sector, founded, headquarters, leadership, key figures, links — so a reader (or a machine) can compare and navigate them rather than browse a gallery.
The company layer. Each operating company’s presence — either a section within the group platform, or a standalone site sharing the group’s design system. The decision depends on how independent the company’s brand and audience are; a consumer bank and an industrial subsidiary rarely want the same treatment.
The shared layer. News, careers, sustainability, investor documents and contact — content that belongs to everyone and must therefore be modelled once and syndicated, not copied.
The architecture is the set of rules that place every piece of content in exactly one of these layers, with defined relationships between them. Design and engineering follow those rules.
Why it matters
Without this decision, group websites drift into one of two failures. The first is the brochure: a beautiful corporate site that says nothing specific, because anything specific belongs to a company. The second is the sprawl: fourteen websites with fourteen navigations, where the same news story exists in five versions and the group’s own identity is the least visible thing on the internet.
Both failures are expensive in the same way — they make the organization hard to understand. Investors, regulators, journalists and candidates all pay that cost. So do search engines and AI systems, which have to decide whether these are one entity or fourteen, and usually decide wrong.
In practice
One of Türkiye’s largest holdings came to us with exactly this sprawl. The group site was a gateway to subsidiaries with nothing of its own to say; the subsidiaries each ran their own agency and their own design. The brief was a corporate redesign. The work was an architecture.
We defined the four layers, modelled the portfolio as structured entities, and built a design system that each company could apply with its own accent — colour, imagery, tone — inside a shared structure. Group news became one source with company-level views. Investor content moved to an accessible, structured section instead of a folder of PDFs. The visible result is a coherent family of websites; the underlying result is that the holding is now understood, by people and machines, as one organization with a portfolio rather than a portfolio with a logo on top.
What to do
Before you redesign a group website, draw the four layers for your organization and place your existing content in them. Anything that sits in two layers at once is a governance problem, not a design problem. Anything that sits in none is either missing or unnecessary. Decide, per operating company, whether it lives inside the platform or beside it — and write down why. Only then brief the design.
This is the heart of our Content & Information Architecture capability, and of our work with holding companies.
FAQ
Should every subsidiary have its own website?
Only if it has its own audience and brand strategy that the group site cannot serve. Independence is expensive to maintain; grant it where it earns its keep, and give everyone else a strong section within the group platform.
How do we handle investor content?
As structured, accessible content — financial results, governance, disclosures, calendar — published as HTML with documents attached, in each required language. Investor sections built as PDF libraries are invisible to search and to AI, and hard for humans too.
Can we do this incrementally?
Yes. Define the architecture and the design system first, launch the group layer and the shared layer, then migrate companies in a sequence that reflects their readiness. The rules are what must be complete on day one; the migration can follow.
Restructuring a group presence? Let’s start with the architecture.