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.

How can a content management system ( CMS ) be set up to reach your current and future audience? 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 for an omnichannel information strategy, and the model needed conceptual types, which are types of types that are categorized according to their meaning rather than their presentation. 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 style in order to support material reuse on the level that my customer needed.

Despite our best purposes, 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 information 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. Because it made the layouts feel more recognizable, the previous approach was more intuitive, at first, at least initially. We learned two guiding principles that helped the team comprehend how a willing model and the design processes we were familiar with were:

Instead of design, content models may establish semantics.
And glad models may 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 content, 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 conceptual content concept is by reviewing the types and qualities that Schema has defined. com, a community-driven tool 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 semantic content model. 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 visitors could access your content without ever walking into 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 as be used by a bot to answer 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 ). 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.

Write an essay or article about it. An article’s meaning and usefulness depends upon its parts being kept together. Would one of the headings or paragraphs have any significance on their own if the entire article were not included? 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. The content model lacked instincts, so we had to follow our instincts. Shouldn’t we make adding multiple tabs in the future as simple and flexible as possible?

Because our design-system instincts were so well-known, it appeared that we needed a “tab section” content type so that multiple tab sections could be added to a page. 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 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. 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 content they were planning to display in the tabs.

In fact, the customer could have chosen to display this content elsewhere in a different manner, without tabs. In response to this realization, we created content types for the software product based on the meaningful attributes 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 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 shape 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 Google and other interfaces understand your content, remember:

A design system isn’t a content model. Team members may be persuaded to combine them and have their content model resemble their design system, so you should guard the semantic and contextual integrity of the content strategy throughout the entire implementation process. 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 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.