Design change forcing model change

Setting up a content model with pages at its core will mean it’s outdated when the design of the pages changes. These days, when changing the website design every couple of years is pretty much the norm, it means that you will have to hack your existing model to fit the new trend, switch the CMS because the old one is “not flexible enough,” or redo the content model from scratch.  

Repetitive content creation

Another thing to watch out for is sufficiently chunking the content. It’s really easy to design a long form with dozens of elements needed for your pages to work. Often, not much thought is given about if any of those elements and their content are being reused somewhere else. It’s very easy to add an element for an asset, but often there is related metadata stored in other elements. That picture of a mattress will always need the same type of metadata. Do you want the authors to re-add the same description, alt tag, or categories every time they use a shared asset? This approach introduces consistency issues and forces a lot of copy-paste work that no one is a fan of. 

Channel specific content

A very common approach to covering multiple channels is to add elements for a specific delivery medium. Some CMS vendors have these in their content type templates. Often, there is a Facebook post description or a Twitter summary in the long list of elements. So with every new social network, a new element is added, but when do you stop? This isn’t how you create a future-proof content model. No developer wants to spend their time adding new fields, hooking up the business logic—and then what do the editors do? They copy-paste the content from other elements. 

Learn how to cover topics like Personalization or Marketing Automation.

WYSIWYG causes more harm than good

Overuse of WYSIWYG elements and embedding layout information into text has been giving editors layout changing powers since the release of Microsoft FrontPage. This approach might be great for a one-person business but companies with complex content operations value consistency over layout editing freedom. As for developers, there is no greater joy than having your stylesheet overridden or having to deal with unexpected inline JavaScript. And yes, most online channels utilize HTML but quite a few don’t. Just ask someone how easy it is to use RegEx to extract any useful information from HTML elements full of tables.   

Jozo, one of our marketers at Kentico, wrote a great article on this topic - Kontent hates: WYSIWYG.

Non-transparent content relationships 

Missing out on useful metadata locks you into using relationships for everything. Linking one item to another will be a must in order to express any relationship. These tangled relationship dependencies will be a pain to manage and to use within the code. If you miss an important relationship, it’s almost impossible to add it back into the model. A metadata-driven approach is much easier to enhance, maintain, and utilize to surface information in the right context.  

Designing content models that are not future-proof wastes everyoneʼs time. There are some winners though. Sooner or later, the client will outgrow such an inflexible content model and if you are lucky, you get to design a new one. If you are not, another agency will happily take your place.

Weʼve got you covered if you need even more reasons why to learn content modeling.

Key Points

To sum up:

• Embedding form and layout into the content model means that a design change on the front end might trigger a content model change. 
• Not preparing reusable content chunks leads to repetitive content creation, and thus to inconsistencies. 
• Widely supporting WYSIWYG editors causes formatting to be embedded into the text.
• Heavily leaning on linked content items leads to non-transparent content item relationships.