Is Your Website a Department Store or a Shopping Mall?
When you have multiple brands, divisions, or products, figuring out how to organize your website can get messy fast. We run into this all the time with clients who say, “We have three business lines and want them all to live under one site, but still feel distinct.” That’s when I usually ask: Are we building a department store or a shopping mall?
The Department Store Model
A department store is one brand, one roof, one shared experience. Think Nordstrom. You walk in, and everything feels cohesive—the signage, the music, the checkout process, even the smell (seriously, they all smell the same). But inside, there are departments: shoes, beauty, home, kids, men’s. They’re separate, but connected.
A department store website works the same way. You have different sections for each product line or audience, but it all feels unified—same logo, same navigation, same tone, same checkout. You can move between departments easily because it’s one store.
This model works best when your audiences overlap, or when someone browsing in one “aisle” might benefit from seeing what’s in another. It’s also great if you want to build one consistent brand presence instead of managing several smaller ones.
We’ve used this approach with clients like Space Foundation and others currently in progress. It’s simpler for users, cleaner for SEO, and much easier to maintain long-term. The tradeoff? Everyone has to agree on shared design, messaging, and tone—which, as anyone who’s ever worked in branding knows, can take a few rounds of discussion (and maybe a glass of wine).
The Shopping Mall Model
A shopping mall, on the other hand, is multiple stores that share a parking lot but not much else. Every store has its own layout, employees, pricing, and personality. You can walk between them, but each is a self-contained experience.
A mall-style website means each brand or division gets its own site or subdomain. You might have:
Each one with its own design, messaging, and functionality. This setup is best when your audiences are completely different or when the brands stand alone in the market. You get flexibility and freedom, but also more work—separate CMS setups, analytics, SEO, maintenance, and design systems. It’s more expensive, but sometimes it’s worth it.
The Hybrid: Connected Stores in One Mall
Most organizations fall somewhere in the middle. They want each division to have its own identity but still share a front door. That’s the hybrid model: separate “stores,” shared hallway.
We took this approach for CEI, a client with several focus areas that needed to feel distinct but still part of one brand family. Their users could move easily between sections without feeling lost, but each division had a slightly different voice and visual cues. It’s a great balance when you want unity without uniformity.
So Which One Are You?
When you’re planning or redesigning your website, ask yourself:
Do you want visitors to feel like they’re browsing different aisles or different buildings?
Will they benefit from exploring other parts of your business, or will that just confuse them?
Are you trying to build one big brand, or several smaller ones?
There’s no one right answer. But if you don’t choose, your website will choose for you—and that’s when things start to get weird. We’ve all seen it: a homepage that tries to be everything to everyone, with three logos, four menus, and no clear path for users. It’s like a mall food court pretending to be a Michelin restaurant.
The department store model creates simplicity and unity. The shopping mall model creates flexibility and independence. The best sites often borrow from both—a little structure, a little freedom.
Just don’t make your users wander across the parking lot to find what they need.
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