One Website, Three Domains: How We Launched Malaysia and GCC Without Building Two More Sites

When a company expands into a new region, a website question shows up almost immediately: do we need a new site? For Concept Dash, expanding into Malaysia and the GCC raised exactly that, and the way we answered it saved a lot of ongoing work.

This follows the website rebuild, where we gave the main site a proper structure. This post is about what we did next with it.

The setup: two new regions, two new domains#

We registered a domain for each new region:

• conceptdash.ae for the GCC
• conceptdash.my for Malaysia

The main website stays at conceptdash.ca. So the starting point was three domains and three audiences.

The problem: more websites means more maintenance#

The obvious move is one website per domain. It sounds clean, and it is a trap.

Every website you add is a website you have to look after. Content changes, design fixes, security updates and deployments all multiply by three. We are a small team, and there are very few people to maintain websites. In practice, I am the one who does it.

Three separate sites would have meant maintaining websites forever, instead of improving them. And they would have drifted apart: one site updated, another forgotten, and a customer in one region seeing something out of date.

The fix: regions as routes on one site#

Instead of three sites, I built one site with regional routes.

Inside the main conceptdash.ca website, I added two routes:

• /malaysia
• /gcc

Then I pointed the regional domains at them. Typing conceptdash.my into a browser takes you to conceptdash.ca/malaysia, and conceptdash.ae takes you to the GCC route.

Making each region feel like its own brand#

A route on the same site must not look like the same site with a different heading. Each region has its own brand guidelines, so each route needed its own identity.

I handled that with design tokens: named values for colours, type and other style decisions. The site is styled from those tokens, so for each region I changed the tokens to match that region's brand guidelines. Then I gave each route a complete, proper look of its own.

The result is that a visitor to the Malaysia or GCC route sees a site that looks built for them, even though it runs on the same code as everything else.

Local language: Malay and Arabic#

The next requirement was local language.

• The Malaysia route supports Malay.
• The GCC route supports Arabic.

A visitor who types the GCC domain lands on a site in their own language, and nothing about it suggests it is a section of a larger website. It feels like the GCC website of Concept Dash, because for that visitor it is.

Why this works so well#

One update, three sites. Because all three are the same website, a change made once shows up for everyone. A new section, a fix or a content update goes live on the main site, Malaysia and the GCC at the same time.

Links that look separate. Our emails, newsletters and campaigns can link to the regional domains. Recipients land on a regional address and have no idea it is one website underneath.

Small team friendly. One codebase is something one person can look after properly.

What to consider before copying this#

• Decide redirect vs rewrite on purpose, because it changes what visitors and search engines see.
• Label each language and region properly, so search engines can serve the right version to the right country.
• Keep the tokens disciplined. The approach works only if the whole site is styled from tokens, not from hard-coded values.
• Expect right-to-left work for Arabic.
• Know when to split. If a region ever needs very different features or a different team, a separate site may be right. Until then, one site is much cheaper to keep alive.

If your company is expanding into new regions and you want to avoid maintaining a pile of separate websites, share a short brief through the project form on this site and we can scope it together. You can also read about the website design and development service or browse more case studies.