Going global

When a brand opens its second door, the second website feels like the obvious move. It's quick. The local team gets its own domain and its own platform. They can post the new menu at midnight without asking anyone. Every one of those reasons is real, and I'd have made the same call if I'd only been thinking about one venue.

But a brand with two locations is rarely planning to stop at two. T-Squared had London coming, more US cities on the list and licensing conversations starting. The question was never "what does St Andrews need this month." It was "what does this brand look like online at ten venues in four countries."

Search splits first. Two sites with the same name divide whatever authority the brand has earned, and every new site starts close to zero. The brand ends up fighting itself for its own name.

Then the numbers split. Two analytics setups, two sets of reports, and nobody can see the brand as a whole. You can't tell whether a London guest found you through a Midtown article, because those are two different worlds.

Then the work doubles. Every shared update, every campaign, every change to the about page gets made twice and drifts a little each time. Multiply that by every venue on the roadmap and a standalone site per location stops being the cheap option very quickly.

And the story drifts. Two front doors, built at two different times by two different teams, tell two slightly different versions of who you are.

I've written about brand architecture before: what's fixed and what flexes. A website is that same decision, made visible. You can feel whether someone made it on purpose.

For T-Squared, the fixed parts are the domain, the templates, the navigation, the brand pages, the voice and the identity. The parts that flex are the menus, the events, the photography, the hours and the booking. Each venue gets the same set of rooms to fill: eat, play, watch and events. Each one fills them with its own life.

Coherence isn't sameness. A new venue should be a new folder, not a new website.

This is the part that looks fussy until it doesn't. Every T-Squared location lives at a path that spells out country, region and city. Midtown is /locations/us/ny/nyc-midtown. St Andrews is /locations/uk/scotland/st-andrews.

With two venues, that's overkill. You could have used /midtown and /standrews and moved on. With ten, the long version is the only thing still organized. When London opens, it sits under the UK next to St Andrews, and nothing that already exists has to move. Search engines read the structure. People read it too.

The homepage asks one question: which venue? Everything after that is local. The brand pages, About, News and Contact, are shared, so the story is told once and told the same way.

Booking is where the guest actually decides, so it has to live inside the venue's pages, not off to the side. For St Andrews, I played a lead role in building that out on SevenRooms, so a guest can book from anywhere on the site.

Around the same time, we were working out what T² means as the brand grows. T-Squared was founded by Tiger Woods and Justin Timberlake, and that foundation isn't going anywhere. It's the reason the brand exists, and it's still one of the best origin stories in hospitality.

What we realized was that we were building something that could go further than any one name. T² also stands for Time Together, the thing the founders were chasing in the first place. In a licensing meeting in London, the founders open the door and the experience carries the conversation.

That's the same idea as the website. One domain carries one story, and it has to be a story that works in every city on the map. Two domains will always end up telling two.

Decide the structure before the second venue, not the fifth. Moving later is always more expensive than starting right.

Pick paths that work at ten locations, even if they feel long at two.

Share the templates. Let the content be local.

Run one analytics view, so you can see the brand and not just the venues.

Put booking inside the venue's pages.

None of this is complicated. It just has to be decided by someone looking at the whole brand, before the next website goes up by Friday.

If your brand is about to open its next door, get in touch.