Content Modelling
Last Update: 16-Jun-2009
The best web sites have great content that is findable, engaging and informative. But a web site is like an iceberg. Above sea level, it’s presented as a collection of inter-connected, nicely laid out, two-dimensional web pages. Like a book. But that’s where the analogy stops and the challenges start. Imagine a book where the pages change depending on who you are, where you are, and what you’re doing? What if paragraphs on a page allowed you to submit comments, read comments left by your peers, link off to other pages, vote for the bits you like or dislike, and change as the author edits the book. Suddenly books are no longer simple bedtime reading material but a conversation between you and its authors.
Below sea level is where the content lives. The more complex the site and/or the amount of content there is, the greater the need to model the content. Content modelling is the process of creating and maintaining a content model. A content model is a representation of your information. This could be a diagram on a whiteboard, a pile of cards describing your products and services, an excel spreadsheet, or a fancy content modelling tool. All or none of them may be appropriate for your particular situation. What is important is that there is agreement on what the content is and the way its is communicated to all interested parties. That is what the content model should bring to the table. The means to define, describe and discuss content.
Now, there are no hard or fast rules for what a content model should look like nor how you should set about creating one. However, there are guidelines and best practices that we can beg, borrow and steal from other disciplines such as data modelling and object modelling. Hopefully, with a lot of help from other interested folks, we can turn content modelling into a recognised upstream activity and not swept overboard for the technology teams to perform, wrongly or rightly, on behalf of the business. It’s your content after all, not theirs!