Avoid Fractured Franchise Brand and User Experiences With a Multi-Site Approach to Web Design
Umbrella organizations made up of multiple smaller entities present some obvious challenges when it comes to their web presence — from choosing the right infrastructure to efficiently managing content, conveying cohesive brand messaging, and more. But franchise systems take these digital challenges to the next level.
Franchise systems have a unique structure consisting of a corporate “parent” organization and tens, hundreds, or even thousands of “child” locations that can be widely dispersed over many geographic regions and cultures (think Subway with 19,573 outlets in 100+ countries and McDonald’s with 13,452 worldwide).
A website design system helps these complex organizations by providing a shared, structured framework that simplifies site development, ensures consistency, and improves the user experience — making it easier for both corporate teams and local franchisees to effectively manage their online presence and expand over time.
Why Not Just Let Franchisees Go It Alone?
According to MSA Worldwide, a West Hartford, CT-based strategic and tactical franchise advisory firm, allowing franchisees to develop independent websites with no central governance is a strategy fraught with risks like:
- User confusion
- Inconsistent messaging
- Brand dilution
- Intra-brand competition and territorial disputes due to franchisees overstepping the geographic boundaries that franchisors work hard to maintain
- And more
What’s more, some of these risks can carry over and negatively impact the organization at the brick-and-mortar level, as well.
Franchise Multi-Site Strategy
Not sure how to get started with a franchise multi-site strategy? Let’s look at some key considerations.
Involve Relevant Stakeholders From the Start — From the Corporate Level Down to the Individual Franchisees
Your multi-site strategy will need to support a wide range of needs and use cases across your franchise system, so it’s important to foster a universal understanding of those needs. It’s best to involve corporate leadership, franchise/department leads, and content managers as early as possible, but also to ensure their role in decision-making is clearly understood (i.e., how much influence they will have over the end product). You can use a RACI Chart to categorize team members, administrators, department heads, and other stakeholders and define their roles in the project.
Select the Right Content Management System
There are many platforms to choose from – how do you identify the best one for your franchise organization? Some questions to help your team land on the right CMS:
- Do we have an existing tech stack to consider?
- What are the top 3 most important criteria for our content management, marketing, and technology teams?
You’ll likely want to select a platform that offers the following 5 features:
1. A Point-and-Click Editor
Creates fully customized pages without the need for coding.
2. Centralized Media Management
Allows content managers across the organization to upload pictures, apply cropping, and add ALT tags/captions for use across multiple related sites.
3. User Authentication That Is Local or Connected to Single Sign-On
Supports its own fully isolated user accounts, but can also be connected to the following other sign-on systems with group membership and related attributes applied:
-
- Active Directory/LDAP
- SAML
- Shibboleth
- CAS
4. Granular Permissions
Allows site owners to customize what tasks groups and individual users can perform across the site framework.
5. Workflow & Content States
Creates an editorial workflow that accounts for various user roles, permissions, and “states” of content (e.g., information that is in draft vs. published form) so different editors and content contributors have different levels of access to the site.
Some other fundamental requirements you’ll want to look for include:
- SSL-encrypted data and strong password policies
- Ability to support flexible, component-based page creation
- Separation of presentation and content to keep content portable
- Centralized management of multiple sites/subsites
- Backups & disaster recovery procedures
- Scheduled security updates/patches
- Widespread use so you can get support and find developers
Establish Your Technical Infrastructure
There are several different ways to approach the technical infrastructure for a franchise system – the most common are outlined below. Your organization’s specific needs will determine which is the right choice for you.
One Main Site With Embedded Subsites
In this approach, there is a single CMS install, and the franchisee subsites exist within the main corporate site as robust subsections. When browsing to one of the subsections, the logo, header, and menus may change, but everything is housed in the same CMS instance.
Individual Sites Built From Shared Base Components
Each franchisee has its own site and a completely separate instance of the CMS, but the CMS configuration and theme are built from a “base” install that has been customized for your organization.
Built-in Multisite Capabilities
Some CMS platforms support a “multi-site” configuration, where each franchisee site has its own database for storing content, but is inheriting some or all of its code and configuration from the central corporate parent site. Changes to the parent site are immediately reflected in the other sites, allowing for a “hub and spoke” configuration that provides autonomy for franchisees while still providing central management for updates and configuration.
Site Network
The WordPress CMS has the concept of a “network” of sites, which are sites that have separate domains but operate from a single WordPress installation. The franchisee sites appear to be completely separate, but they all share a database, and some configuration can be centrally managed from the WordPress dashboard.
Case in Point: Huntington Learning Center
Built on a WordPress framework, the phased site network we created for national tutoring and test prep leader Huntington Learning Center spans their corporate presence and nearly 280 franchise center sites — with a shared look and feel but semi-custom content strategies.
The interactive Find a Center feature leverages geolocation to create a list of franchise centers that are near each specific user — and ready and waiting to serve them.
Need more help? Read these related guides — and reach out to our team to discuss your franchise system’s digital project needs.
