Launching a new website is exciting. You get to watch your pain points from the past site transform into new opportunities. A new design, CMS, or structure doesn’t change the information on your site, though. Without addressing the content, you may find the same old problems cropping back up.

The challenge becomes evolving your content to match the design and functional changes to take advantage of your new system. Empty pages are intimidating, and a new site is full of them. Even harder is writing pages when you don’t have a clear goal or understanding of all the tools at your disposal.

Content modeling is a tool to plan out content needs without having everything built. For a website, it allows content specialists to begin connecting the functional, design, and user experience pieces together and communicate the needs to subject matter experts and writers. By discussing the information needs earlier, you can start writing quicker and catch hidden content requirements earlier in the process.

Types of Content Models

A content model takes many forms, and evolves throughout the life of the project. At the highest level, and at its most conceptual, it describes the types of content and the relationships between each kind. For example, a news page is accessed from a news listing. But you may also want a relationship between a faculty profile and news pages, if the faculty are also the authors. These high-level relationships start to inform the design and functionality of the end product.

A more detailed model defines what is contained in each type of content, such as component recommendations and specific pieces of info that may be necessary. Using our news page example, you may have an author, a category, a publication date, and other related articles.

At its most detailed, the model begins to provide a visual representation of the information, making it easier for a writer to conceptualize what needs to be written and how it will be used.

Using Content Models as Communication Tools

Talking about what to write without the finished CMS can be difficult. It is even harder when designs haven’t been finalized. It can feel like handing an author an empty page of paper and asking them to turn it into a website. A content model gives you something to visualize and frame the purpose of a page, helping establish guidelines for how the content will be used.

The collaboration between content specialist and author to create the content model opens communication about concepts that have traditionally happened farther along in the project, when changes are harder to accommodate and potentially more costly. The visual aspect of the model, the discussion of relationships, and the definition of requirements gets subject matter experts involved earlier in the design and development process, and creates a shared framework to talk about these needs. It also starts the writing process by helping authors understand what they’ll need for each page.

Creating a content model uncovers requirements earlier in the process. When you start talking about actual content needs during the design phase, you can address them right away, instead of retrofitting solutions at the end of the project. Early discussions reinforce that content is the driving force and critical to leveraging the best features of a new design and website.

Further Reading & Insights