Go live with the content model

In any establishment, everything evolves. To get to or stay at the top of your business field, you always need to innovate and keep up with the current needs and trends. This is the same for your content model.This lesson shares a few steps to ensure that your content model is still beneficial in the future as you go live and avoid any chances of redoing the whole process again.

Ensure the right division

1. Group content elements based on their purpose

In your content model diagram, go through each content type once more and group elements that are related together into content groups. Content groups make it easier for content creators because of two main reasons:

They can focus on related elements only. If they’re writing, they can see only the main content. If they’re filling in metadata, they see metadata only. Avoid forcing your users to scroll under the main content that has a different length in each content item.
Let people in a given role in the project focus on relevant elements only. With content groups, you can set different permissions to different parts of content items so that authorized people can only make changes where they have access.

2. Crumble content into smaller pieces

In coffee, the smallest assembly pieces are coffee grounds. In insurance, they can be insurance parameters. In content modeling, the smallest reusable pieces are chunks. Chunks are another content type that holds a piece of content that’s reused in multiple places.

If you reuse content or find an embedded set of elements with a strong intent (for example, CTAs, tasks, steps, diagrams, infographics, or quotes), chunk it.

Create a content type, for example, named Chunk.
If you set limitations to different elements, typically in rich text, ensure that Chunk is allowed.

Then, when you create content that will be reused or when you want to copy and paste content from an existing content item:

Create a chunk instead – a content item based on the Chunk content type.
Create the content in the chunk.
Link both target content items to the chunk.

However, try to keep 2–3 levels of content nesting (for chunks and content items) at most. More levels lead to losing the context when going through a content item.

Stay relevant

3. Verify your content model responds to your needs

Once you create the first iteration of your model, take a step back and check if the content model addresses your requirements. Both re-platforming and new implementations usually come with a checklist of pain points or requirements. Double-check if the new model is addressing them. Use a spreadsheet to list:

Requirements
Pain points
Internal and external stakeholder needs
Usability
Support of the customer journeys

Then, map your content types (or even content items) to them. This way, you can keep track of how, for example, your metadata can help you support your customer journeys. Remove everything non-essential.

4. Ensure your content model won’t become a burden

As needs change over time, scheduling yearly content audits and reviews of the content model is important. Audits prevent content to ROT (to become redundant, outdated, and full of trivial content), which is essential so that you don’t need to repeat the whole process from the beginning, and the model still brings you the most significant value possible.

What’s next?

With all these suggestions, you can keep refining the content model repeatedly without having to redo the whole content model preparation from scratch.The content model that you have now is:

Extendable – via content type snippets and elaborated content types
Flexible – you can reuse important content types as components or linked items
Essential – containing little to no embedded formatting and layout information

Ensure the right division

1. Group content elements based on their purpose

They can focus on related elements only. If they’re writing, they can see only the main content. If they’re filling in metadata, they see metadata only. Avoid forcing your users to scroll under the main content that has a different length in each content item.
Let people in a given role in the project focus on relevant elements only. With content groups, you can set different permissions to different parts of content items so that authorized people can only make changes where they have access.

2. Crumble content into smaller pieces

If you reuse content or find an embedded set of elements with a strong intent (for example, CTAs, tasks, steps, diagrams, infographics, or quotes), chunk it.

Create a content type, for example, named Chunk.
If you set limitations to different elements, typically in rich text, ensure that Chunk is allowed.

Then, when you create content that will be reused or when you want to copy and paste content from an existing content item:

Create a chunk instead – a content item based on the Chunk content type.
Create the content in the chunk.
Link both target content items to the chunk.

However, try to keep 2–3 levels of content nesting (for chunks and content items) at most. More levels lead to losing the context when going through a content item.

Stay relevant

3. Verify your content model responds to your needs

Requirements
Pain points
Internal and external stakeholder needs
Usability
Support of the customer journeys

4. Ensure your content model won’t become a burden

What’s next?

With all these suggestions, you can keep refining the content model repeatedly without having to redo the whole content model preparation from scratch.The content model that you have now is:

Extendable – via content type snippets and elaborated content types
Flexible – you can reuse important content types as components or linked items
Essential – containing little to no embedded formatting and layout information

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Chunking is also sometimes used to describe grouping of elements. In this tutorial, this term describes breaking down of complex content types into smaller, reusable content pieces.

Best practices on chunkingIf chunking got your interest, read more on this topic. We recommend:

Want Content That’s More Usable & Reusable? Chunk It by Marcia Riefer Johnston, which contains examples, a task, and a video regarding chunking content
How will content chunks improve your content model for a headless CMS by our own Boris Pocatko on our Content Modeling Hub, which explains chunking in more detail

You can also use schema.org

to make sure you didn’t miss any essential elements. However, mirroring the whole object structure is usually not necessary.

Set a recurring reminder to audit and reviewWe recommend setting a recurring calendar event to that part of the year when you can devote some time to the revision.