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Go live with the content model

Boris Pocatko, Tomas Nosek
8 minutes
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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.
Navigating through content groups in a content item.
How content groups look in a content item

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.
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.
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.
  1. Create a content type, for example, named Chunk.
  2. 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:
  1. Create a chunk instead – a content item based on the Chunk content type.
  2. Create the content in the chunk.
  3. Link both target content items to the chunk.
A repeated text is reused, and when it's changed later, you change it in one place only
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.
Best practices on chunkingIf chunking got your interest, read more on this topic. We recommend: 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.

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.
Cross-check faster using the content model visualizerUse the content model visualizer for a live, interactive view of your model that will help you cross-check your spreadsheet. You can edit, isolate, and explore relationships between content types, snippets, and taxonomies within your content model. Confirm that every requirement or pain point is covered, then adjust your model before you move on.

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.
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.

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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