A content model is not a design system (2021)

#109 · ✸ 42 · 💬 4 · one year ago · alistapart.com · labrador · 📷
How do you set up a content management system to reach your audience now and in the future? I learned the hard way that creating a content model-a definition of content types, attributes, and relationships that let people and systems understand content-with my more familiar design-system thinking would capsize my customer's omnichannel content strategy. A content model is a critical foundation for an omnichannel content strategy, and for our content to be understood by multiple systems, the model needed semantic types-types named according to their meaning instead of their presentation. Our tendency to approach the content model with our familiar design-system thinking constantly led us to veer away from one of the primary purposes of a content model: delivering content to audiences on multiple marketing channels. Even if your team doesn't care about omnichannel content, a semantic content model decouples content from its presentation so that teams can evolve the website's design without needing to refactor its content. 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. After struggling to describe what makes a good content model, I've come to realize that the best models are those that are semantic and that also connect related content components, instead of slicing up related content across disparate content components. Our inclination to break down the content model into "Tab section" pieces would have led to an unnecessarily complex model and a cumbersome editing experience, and it would have also created content that couldn't have been understood by additional delivery channels.
A content model is not a design system (2021)



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