Content-first approach

Tomas Nosek, Jan Cerman

11 minutes

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With a new content management system (CMS), there are usually changes coming. They’ll indeed come with Kontent.ai as well. But they’re good changes.Kontent.ai enables everybody to work with content efficiently by separating content creation and content presentation. With this division, you can provide smooth customer experience by effortlessly publishing on every channel your customers are using.

Content first, design second

Even though many people will claim it, not everybody can write. Headless CMSs come with the content creator’s work in mind, so it’s likely much more focused on the messaging than your previous systems.

Thinking about what content will look like is natural; humans are visual creatures, after all. However, this way, your content won’t likely fit all channels. Watch the video below to see why the one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work with content.

Put away your design hat

It can take some time to think less about the design of your content. Most people are used to it from the word processors like Microsoft Word that have been around for ages. But the more time you spend thinking about your content and not the design, the better your content will get.

What content-first creation looks like, then?

In a headless CMS, you apply semantic formatting to content instead of visual formatting. This creates a structure needed to reuse the content on all your channels. This setup gives you the option to forget about visuals and focus on your content messaging.

Decisions, decisions: Content or design?

Here’s a short list of activities. They’re all decisions you might have made in the past when creating content. Think about whether the activity is about designing content or the content itself. And if the decision should be made by you as a content creator or the channel your content might be displayed in.

Content decision

Design decision

The table vs. list problem

The “product details” options in the previous exercise were a bit of a catch.

“Add product details to an article“

Adding them to the content itself is a content decision. If you don’t add the details, you can’t show them anywhere anyhow.

“Add product details as a table to an article“

The option with “as a table” is a design question. It could also be a list or a link. Which would be better?

Product item shown as a table and a list. — Product item shown first as a table and then as a list.

As we’ve shown before, different channels require different appearances. That’s why the “list vs. table problem” is a design decision. There’s a lot of space on the web, so displaying a table is not a problem. On mobile phones, space is precious, so just a simple remark with a link may be more suitable. Other channels may prefer one of these solutions or even a completely different one. That’s why this is something that the channel should decide, and it shouldn’t be up to you as the author. The channel follows the rules set by the design team and implemented by the developers.

Not just channels

The whole time, this lesson has been about publishing to all the channels simultaneously. Channels are about different ways to get to the customer. The web, mobile, billboards, and so on. From the technical point of view (without being technical 🙂), your organization likely has many systems in its ecosystem that power these channels. CMSs, tools, apps, whatever “cogwheels” keep your channels (and the overall machine) running. And it’s not unusual that one of the cogwheels needs to be replaced. Such change also often requires content creators to copy-paste or adapt their content. When going headless, content production is separate from the technical stuff and can also run in parallel or even before setting up the technicalities. This means headless brings less work for you while delivering content on time and within budget for your organization.

The content-first approach in a nutshell

Let’s go through the main points of the content-first approach.

Content designed for one channel will never look well reused among different channels. You need to adjust the output so that the appearance works everywhere.

By reusing content, you can compose content to be used in more channels. Headless CMSs can reuse content for different channels because of semantic formatting instead of typical visual formatting.

Visual formatting is something designers should set and developers implement. Content creators should focus on the key takeaway and the content itself, not applying design guidelines correctly.

The principles described here will save you time on copy-pasting and formatting content. Instead, you can devote more time to creative activities, which will make your job more fun and further support your productivity.

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