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 search fragments, and mobile applications, not only our websites. Companies with forward-thinking goals have adopted an holistic information strategy that aims to reach people across a range of digital stations 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 lexical and even join related content, you can avoid that result.

A Fortune 500 company recently tapped me to guide the CMS application. 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 articles 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 group had to be aware of a new design in order to support material 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 information strategies, an holistic information strategy doesn’t rely on WYSIWYG equipment for design and structure. One of the main objectives of a glad design 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 must be followed in order to create a successful information type

We had to explain to our designers, developers, and stakeholders that their previous internet projects had taught them that content should be treated as visible building blocks that fit into layouts. The past view made the designs feel more recognizable and intuitive, at first, at least initially, because it made them feel more recognizable. 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, vocabulary must be used by content versions.
Additionally, 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 simplify the presentation of material, but they do not aid in understanding the meaning of the information, which would have opened the door to the articles presented in each marketing channel. In comparison, a conceptual content 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 conceptual content model has many advantages:

A conceptual material model also gives you a competitive advantage. by including schema-based structured files. 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. 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 used as a voice interface or by a bot to answer frequently asked questions ( FAQ ) pages.

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 first.

Write an essay or article about it. 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. Similar effects could have been felt 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 any number of tabs in the future as simple and as 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 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 these terms? This would have prevented the tabs from ever being rearranged, and logic would have had to be added 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 what was visually and historically significant had obscured the purpose of the designs 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 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 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 Google and other interfaces understand your content, keep in mind:

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 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’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.