A Content Model Is Not a Design System

Do you recall the days gone by when having a successful site was sufficient? Nowadays, people are getting answers from Siri, Google seek fragments, and mobile applications, not only our websites. Organizations with forward-thinking goals have adopted an holistic content strategy that aims to reach people across a range of digital programs and platforms.

However, how can a content management system ( CMS ) be set up to reach your audience both now and in the future? I learned the hard way that creating a content model—a concept of information types, attributes, and relationships that let people and systems understand content—with my more comfortable design-system wondering would collapse my patient’s holistic information strategy. By developing willing versions that are conceptual and that also connect related information, you can avoid that result.

I just had the opportunity to direct the CMS application for a Fortune 500 company. The customer was excited by the benefits of an holistic information plan, including material modify, multichannel marketing, and robot delivery—designing content to be comprehensible to bots, Google knowledge panels, snippets, and voice user interfaces.

For our information to be understood by many systems, the unit needed semantic types, which are names given based on their meaning rather than their presentation. This is crucial for an multichannel content strategy. Our aim was to allow artists to create original content and use it where necessary. However, as the project progressed, I realized that the entire team had to be aware of a new design in order to support willing reuse at the level that my customer needed.

Despite our best motives, we kept drawing from what we were more common with: design techniques. Unlike web-focused material strategies, an holistic information strategy doesn’t rely on WYSIWYG equipment for design and structure. One of the main objectives of a material model was to deliver content to audiences across multiple marketing channels, which is a tendency that we have to approach the material model with.

Two fundamental tenets govern a successful content type

We needed to explain to our designers, developers, and stakeholders that we were undertaking a very unique task from their earlier web projects, where it was common for everyone to view content as visible building blocks that fit into layouts. The past approach made the designs feel more recognizable and intuitive, at first, at least because it was more comfortable and also more intuitive. The team was able to know how a willing model differs from the design systems we were familiar with by discovering two principles:

Instead of design, content models may establish semantics.
And glad models should connect elements that belong together.

Conceptual material models

A conceptual content type uses form and attribute names that reflect the content’s intended purpose and not how it will be displayed. For instance, in a nonsemantic design, groups may make varieties like teasers, press blocks, and cards. These types may make it simple to present information, but they do not aid in understanding the meaning of the information, which would have opened the door to the content presented in each marketing channel. In contrast, a conceptual content model employs type names like product, service, and testimony to allow for each supply route to interpret the information and use it as necessary.

A great place to start when creating a semantic content model is by reviewing the types and properties that Schema has defined. org, a community-driven resource for type definitions that are intelligible to platforms like Google search.

A semantic content model has several benefits:

A semantic content model also gives you a competitive advantage. by including schema-based structured data. org’s types and properties, a website can provide hints to help Google understand the content, display it in search snippets or knowledge panels, and use it to answer voice-interface user questions. Potential customers could access your content without ever visiting your website.
Beyond those practical advantages, you’ll also require an omnichannel content delivery model. Delivery channels must be able to comprehend the same content in order to use it across multiple marketing channels. For instance, if your content model provided a list of questions and answers, it could be easily displayed on a frequently asked questions ( FAQ ) page as well, but it could also be used by a bot that answers frequently asked questions.

For example, using a semantic content model for articles, events, people, and locations lets A List Apart provide cleanly structured data for search engines so that users can read the content on the website, in Google knowledge panels, and even with hypothetical voice interfaces in the future.

Content models that connect

Instead of slicing up related content across disparate content components, I’ve come to the realization that the best models are those that are semantic and also connect related content components ( such as a FAQ item’s question and answer pair ). Content that needs to be reused by multiple delivery channels can be connected to each other without having to assemble those pieces again in a good content model.

Consider creating an essay or article. An article’s meaning and usefulness depends upon its parts being kept together. Without the context of the entire article, would one of the headings or paragraphs have any meaning on their own? Our well-known design-system thinking on our project frequently led us to want to develop content models that would divide content into distinct chunks to fit the web-centric layout. This had a similar effect to an article that had its headline removed. Content that belonged together became challenging to manage and nearly impossible for multiple delivery channels to understand because we were cutting content into separate pieces based on layout.

To illustrate, let’s look at how connecting related content applies in a real-world scenario. A complex layout for a software product page that included multiple tabs and sections was presented by the client’s design team. Our innate preferences were to follow the content model. Shouldn’t we make adding any number of tabs in the future as simple and as flexible as possible?

We felt like we needed a content type called “tab section” because our design-system instincts were so well-known, so that multiple tab sections could be added to a page. Each tab section would display a variety of content types. One tab might provide the software’s overview or its specifications. Another tab might provide a list of resources.

Our tendency to divide the content model into “tab section” pieces would have resulted in a cumbersome editing process, as well as unnecessarily complex content that couldn’t have been digested by additional delivery channels. How would another system have resorted to counting tab sections and content blocks, for instance, if it had been able to identify a product’s “tab section” when referring to its specifications or resource list? This would have prevented the tabs from ever being rearranged, and it would have required adding logic to each other delivery channel to interpret the layout of the design system. Additionally, it would have been difficult to migrate to a new content model in response to the new page redesign if the customer had decided against displaying this content in a tab layout.

We had a breakthrough when we discovered that our customer had a specific purpose in mind for each tab: it would reveal specific information such as the software product’s overview, specifications, related resources, and pricing. When the design process began, our desire to concentrate on what was visually and historically significant had obscured the purpose of the designs. With a little digging, it didn’t take long to realize that the concept of tabs wasn’t relevant to the content model. What was important was the meaning of the content they were planning to display in the tabs.

In fact, the customer could have chosen to switch to another format, using tabs, elsewhere. Based on the meaningful attributes the customer had desired to display on the web, we created content types for the software product. There were obvious semantic attributes like name and description as well as rich attributes like screenshots, software requirements, and feature lists. The software’s product information stayed together because it wasn’t sliced across separate components like “tab sections” that were derived from the content’s presentation. Any delivery channel—including future ones—could understand and present this content.

Conclusion

In this omnichannel marketing project, we discovered that the best way to maintain our content model was to ensure that it was semantic ( with type and attribute names that reflected the content’s meaning ) and that it preserved content that belonged to be together ( instead of fragmenting it ). These two ideas made it easier for us to decide what to do with the content model based on the design. Remember: If you’re developing a content model to support an omnichannel content strategy, or even if you just want to make sure that Google and other interfaces understand your content, keep in mind:

A design system isn’t a content model. You should maintain the semantic value and contextual structure of the content strategy throughout the entire implementation process because team members might be tempted to combine them and to make your content model resemble your design system. Without the use of a magic decoder ring, every delivery channel will be able to consume the content.
If your team is having trouble making this transition, Schema can still offer some of the advantages. org–based structured data in your website. The benefit of search engine optimization is a compelling reason on its own, even if additional delivery channels aren’t on the horizon in the near future.
Remind the team that separating the content model from the design will allow them to update the designs more quickly because they won’t be hindered by the cost of content migrations. They’ll be able to create new designs without compromising the compatibility between the content and the design, and they’ll be prepared for the upcoming big thing.

You’ll help your team understand these principles by firmly defending them in their efforts to give content the attention it deserves as both your most valuable resource and your most effective way to engage with your audience.