A Content Model Is Not a Design System

Do you recall the days when having a fantastic site was sufficient? Nowadays, people are getting answers from Siri, Google seek fragments, and mobile applications, not only our websites. Forward-thinking companies have adopted an holistic information strategy whose goal is to reach audiences across a variety of digital channels 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 content versions that are conceptual and even join related content, 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.

A content type is essential to an omnichannel content strategy, and it required conceptual types to be given names that don’t depend on how the content is presented. Our goal was to allow writers to create original content that could be used wherever they felt was most useful. However, as the project progressed, I realized that the entire group had to be aware of a new design in order to support material reuse on 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 information strategies, an holistic information strategy doesn’t rely on WYSIWYG equipment for design and structure. Our inclination to approach the material model using our well-known design-system thinking consistently stifled our attention from one of the main objectives of a willing model: delivering content to audiences across multiple marketing channels.

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 physical building blocks that fit into layouts. Because it made the layouts feel more recognizable, the previous approach was more intuitive, at first, at least initially. 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 structure, vocabulary must be used by content versions.
And information that belongs together should be linked to material models.

Conceptual material models

Type and attribute names for semantic articles models are used to represent the content’s intended purpose and not its intended display. 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 comparison, a conceptual material type uses kind names like “product,”” service,” and “testimonial” to allow for each delivery channel to interpret and use the content as it sees fit.

A great place to start when creating a conceptual content concept is by reviewing the types and qualities that Schema has defined. nonprofit, a community-driven source for type meanings that are comprehensible to platforms like Google search.

A semantic information model has many advantages:

A competitive advantage can also be gained by a conceptual content design. by including schema-based structured information. org’s forms and properties, a site can give hints to help Google understand the content, display it in research snippets or information panels, and use it to reply voice-interface customer questions. Prospective visitors could access your content without actually walking into your website.
Beyond those useful advantages, you’ll also require an omnichannel content delivery model. Delivery channels must be able to understand the same content in order to use it across various 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 as be used by a bot to answer frequently asked questions.

For instance, using a conceptual content model for articles, events, people, and locations lets A List Off offer perfectly structured data for search engines so that users may read the content on the website, in Google knowledge panels, and even with speculative 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 ). A good content model connects pieces of content that ought to be preserved so that multiple delivery channels can use it without having to assemble those pieces separately.

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-versed in designing systems frequently led us to want to develop content models that would break content into smaller pieces to fit the web-centric layout. This had a similar effect to an article that had had its headline removed. Because we were dividing content into separate pieces based on layout, content that belonged together became challenging to manage and nearly impossible for multiple delivery channels to comprehend.

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

We felt like we needed a “tab section” content type because our design-system instincts allowed for the addition of multiple tab sections to a page because they were so well-versed. Each tab section would display various kinds of information. 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 an unnecessary complex model and laborious editing procedures, as well as creating content that couldn’t possibly be understood by additional delivery channels. How would a different system have been able to determine which “tab section” referred to a product’s specifications or resource list, for instance? Would that system have had to have used tab sections and content blocks to calculate this? 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. Our desire to concentrate on the visually appealing and well-known had obscured the design’s purpose once implementation began. 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 information that was intended to be displayed in the tabs.

In fact, the customer could have chosen to display this content elsewhere, without tabs. In response to this realization, we decided to create content types for the software product based on the meaningful qualities the client wanted to display on the web. 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 the content model’s semantic consistency was by ensuring that it was semantic ( with type and attribute names that reflected the content’s meaning ) and that it maintained content that belonged together ( as opposed to 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 can now 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 advantage of search engine optimization is a compelling argument on its own, even if additional delivery channels are not in the works.
Remind the team that removing the content model from the design will allow them to update the designs more quickly because content migration costs won’t be prohibitive. They will be prepared for the upcoming big thing, and they will be able to create new designs without compromising the compatibility between the content and the design.

By firmly defending these ideas, you’ll help your team view content as the most important component of your user experience and as the most effective way to engage with your audience.