Content Modeling Process

The first part of the content modeling process is to discover all the content you use in your organization online, in all channels. Products for your webshop, marketing content for your website, content used in your App, and syndication content are examples.

Getting an overview of all current and potential future types of content you are creating to market and sell your products online is a crucial first step.

Once you have an overview of all the content you have, it is time to look for similarities. Do you have product pages for your webshop, perhaps also for your website? What about in your Apps? Do you also syndicate your product information to 3rd party sites for listing there?

Identify if the product information you use across your channels has the same structure. Do they all have Title, brief, variants, pictures, property descriptions, etc.? This might uncover that you have multiple different types of products that need to be described differently.

For example, an ingredient for cooking might be structured differently than an electric stand mixer. But you might sell both in your webshop.

After identifying the different types of content, you start looking for repeating information. This could be the author of a blog post, the manufacturer of an appliance, or a description of an ingredient in a recipe.

The repeating information is what you should then split out in your content model to define what we describe as shapes. Examples of shapes are: Recipe, chef, and ingredient.

Once you have the different shapes of products or structured documents, you can look at relationships. A relationship defines a link between two or more items. It could be ingredients used in a recipe or recipes created by a chef.

Relationships can be used together with catalog structure, topic maps, and grids to organize your information for maximum reuse.

For more in-depth talk about the ins and outs of content modeling please check our Content Modeling 101 which comes with a free downloadable pdf.