An introduction to structured content

Carrie HanePrincipal Digital Strategist at Sanity

A video walkthrough is available for this lesson. Log in with your Sanity.io account to view.

Here are some definitions that will help build an understanding of what Sanity offers.

Headless

A content management system (CMS) or other software product that separates where content is stored (the “body”) from where it is presented (the “head“).

Composable

A term applied to the technology that powers digital experiences. It’s an approach that involves being able to assemble software, frameworks, products, and information to meet today’s needs and easily evolve in the future.

Structured content

Information that is broken into its smallest reasonable pieces, which are explicitly organized and classified to be understandable by computers and humans.

Structured content turns your content into data — the equivalent of LEGO bricks — that can be used over and over in different formations.

Contrary to how it sounds, structured content gives you maximum flexibility for creating endless experiences because it makes your information headless and composable. The structure is based on meaning and intent rather than presentation.

In this way, the "bricks" are put together to form a webpage rather than making the webpage a pre-built whole. You can compose or assemble your website, apps, and other delivery channels as needed from the same set of content data.

Here’s another way to look at it:

Unstructured content...

• Ties content directly to the presentation
• Implies meaning
• Lacks the possibility of reuse somewhere

An unstructured webpage like the one below uses generic section names and visual design terminology.

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Structured content is…

• Disconnected from the presentation
• Explicitly defined
• Possible to use anywhere

This same webpage built with structured content explicitly says what each thing is.

Open to enlarge image

Structured content allows us to put concepts over user interface components.

Concepts are the things that exist whether or not you have a website or an app. Ultimately, most things that are represented digitally have some non-digital twin.

Insurance policies are made up of

• declarations
• insuring agreements
• definitions
• exclusions
• conditions

Music venues have

• seating arrangements
• capacity levels
• age restrictions
• shows
• menu options

Whether you’re in the insurance or the live music business or something else entirely, you have concepts related to your business. They all need to be transformed into digital representations that allow people to get the information they need to make a decision to buy and move seamlessly into the buying process.

The goal of this course is to help you make this transition from blobs to chunks — from unstructured content that only works in a singular place to structured content that can be mixed and matched over and over. Aim for just enough structure to be future-friendly — good enough for now and ready to be updated easily when things change.