Should each business unit have its own website?

Sometimes. If the brands genuinely operate independently with different buyers, separate sites are honest. If they share buyers and back-office services, one well-architected site beats four neglected ones.

How deep should the navigation go?

Two levels visible, three at most. A buyer should reach any service page in two clicks from the homepage. Beyond that and you're hiding revenue.

Should the parent brand sit above the operating divisions?

Almost never in primary navigation. The parent identity belongs in the footer and on a properly written About section that explains the group structure honestly. Putting "Holdings" or "Group" in primary navigation forces buyers to learn your internal structure before they can find what they came for.

Information architecture for diversified maritime groups

A diversified maritime group is hard to website. One holding company, four operating divisions, eleven sub-services, three regions, two languages and a different buyer for each combination. The default response is to mirror the org chart in the sitemap. That’s the wrong answer in almost every case.

Buyers don’t browse your org chart. A chartering manager looking for tanker chartering services doesn’t care that the entity offering it is a 2007 acquisition that still trades under its original name. They care about the service, the fleet, the cover and the people. Information architecture has to surface what the buyer is looking for, not what the corporate structure dictates.

Three architectural patterns that work

Pattern 1: Service-led with brand attribution

The primary navigation is organised around what you do (Ship Management, Port Agency, Bunkering, Offshore Services). Each service page attributes the operating brand within the page. The corporate parent appears on the About page and in the footer.

Right when buyers shop by service and the brands are functional rather than emotional. Most B2B maritime groups fit this pattern.

Pattern 2: Region-led with service drill-down

Primary navigation by geography (Europe, Middle East, Asia Pacific, Americas) with service options under each. Right when service availability genuinely varies by region (which it often does in agency, bunkering and crewing) and the buyer’s question is “what can you do for me at Singapore” rather than “do you do bunkering anywhere”.

The risk: it can hide capabilities. A buyer in Singapore looking for surveying may not realise you also offer it in Rotterdam.

Pattern 3: Brand-led for genuinely separate brands

Each brand gets its own subsite or section, surfaced from a parent landing page. Right when the brands really do trade independently with different buyers, different pricing and different reputations. Wrong when they share customers; you’ll force buyers to know your internal structure.

Most groups think they need pattern 3. Most actually need pattern 1.

What to avoid

Mirroring the org chart. The sitemap should not have “Holdings”, “Operations”, “Logistics Division” as primary navigation. Those are internal labels.

Acronym soup. Group names that mean nothing to a buyer (“MPI Marine Services”, “GLM Holdings”) should sit behind the service offering, not in front of it.

Equal weighting of unequal services. If 80% of your revenue comes from ship management and 20% from bunkering and surveying combined, the navigation should reflect that. A homepage that gives equal real estate to a long-tail service is misallocated.

Hidden services. A real example: a group we audited had a profitable lubricant supply business that didn’t appear in primary nav, only on a six-deep page reachable from a footer link. The business unit had been wondering why their digital pipeline was zero.

The two-click rule

From the homepage, every commercially important service should be reachable in two clicks. Test it: open your homepage, click once, click twice. If you’ve reached an over-arching brand page with no specific service detail, your IA is too deep.

The corollary: services that aren’t reachable in two clicks aren’t reachable. A buyer doing competitive shortlisting in 20 minutes will not click five times to find your offshore wind crew transfer capability. They’ll move on.

Where the corporate story lives

The parent brand isn’t invisible; it’s distributed. The footer carries the parent identity and links to corporate content. The About section explains the group structure with an honest org diagram. Press releases, financial reports and ESG content live on a parent-branded section that doesn’t interfere with service-led navigation.

Done well, the buyer never has to think about the corporate structure to find what they need. Done badly, the corporate structure is the structure of the website, and revenue leaks through every confusing layer.

Three buyer journeys to walk

Pick three real buyer personas: a chartering manager, a port agent, a procurement lead at a manufacturer. Write the journey each takes from your homepage to a meaningful enquiry. Count clicks, count back-button hits, count moments of confusion. If any of the three needs more than two clicks or has to use site search, your IA is the bottleneck, not your design or copy.