The Structured Content Framework

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A lot of digital content is embedded into the interface design in which it is displayed.

A webpage. An email. An app screen.

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Let’s say you need to change the amount of a sales promotion. Without structured content, you have to find all the places you mentioned it throughout your website, on the app, and in the email system — not to mention on Google and other online aggregators. It might take you an hour or more to find and replace the amount everywhere and get it published. And you still run the risk of missing an instance.

What if you could make that change in less than 5 minutes?

The structured content framework is built on 3 principles:

1. Content drives the experience
2. Content is treated as data and modeled based on meaning
3. Content is centrally available

Before we go any further let’s agree on what content is.

Content
Meaningful information that is expressed through a medium for human consumption.

Content is the reason people are coming to you in the first place. Someone is looking for information or trying to complete a task and they find you — through your website, an app, or in search results.

If content is the end product that humans consume and it is the reason people are coming to you in the first place, then content should drive the customer experience.

To allow content to drive, we need to move from nicely built but rigid containers to useful, usable, meaningful expressions of content.

Adding structure allows content to become the material of design. This means that you can select which pieces need to be used in any situation and then create an accessible, usable visual design that allows people to complete their tasks easily while feeling good about their interaction with you.

Let's take information about sponsorship for a conference as an example. Instead of putting sponsor logos or a sponsorship benefits table directly on a webpage, we can think about the characteristics of sponsorships and the companies that buy them.

Those characteristics become the pieces of content that come together however we need them to in different contexts. In this case, we use it to have a categorized listing of sponsor logos that appears in many places on the website and a grid of sponsorship packages.

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Now content is not trapped on a single-purpose webpage. It is free to go anywhere at any time.

You want to make content current, accurate, relevant, and trustworthy — in many places.

To do that as efficiently as possible, content needs to become data that has built-in meaning so that it can be used in any context.

A lesson webpage could be created based on visual design components that could contain anything.

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Or we can think about a course being made up of lessons that are presented by a presenter.

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With that data, we can create a Course template that creates a new web page when you add the information about it to your CMS.

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We can also create a Lesson template that automatically creates a corresponding webpage when you publish the lesson information.

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This same information could be presented in many other places without changing the content.

Structured content provides the pathway to the ability to COPE: Create Once, Published Everywhere.

It isn’t likely that your organization will have content in only one CMS or database.

Structured content can be stored in and accessed through multiple content repositories.

Storing it as data allows it to be retrieved as needed and displayed with rules set by the interface, making dynamic displays possible at scale. It’s like having several bins of LEGO to pull from.

Here we have information from Shopify and Sanity coming together for an e-commerce website. No copying and pasting information! Just data connections that make the Shopify product data available in Sanity just like any content that natively lives in Sanity.

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Let’s take a look at how this works using a live music venue management company as an example.

They have been operating a venue for five years and are now adding two new venues to their portfolio. While they have successfully managed the website for a single venue, the expansion means they need a more efficient way to manage information about their venues and shows so that they can promote them in a wide range of places.

Using Sanity, they can set up an Event content type that can be used for shows at any of the venues. They break it down into these fields, which match how concert-goers think about shows.

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Who is playing?

• Headliner
• Supporting Acts
• Event Description

When and where is the show?

• Venue
• Date
• Door Time
• Show Start Time

How much are tickets? Where do I get them?

• Ticket Price
• Ticket Purchase Link

The company will also want other structured content types to…

• Make it easy to manage content for all the shows and venues at scale
• Power their evolving web presence
• Keep up with concert aggregators and ticket sellers

Choosing content types and defining the structure is done through content modeling, which we’ll get to in the next lesson.

When you take a step back and think about what your company does and offers rather than what each website and app will look like, you start to see how you can break everyday concepts into smaller chunks and represent them digitally in many ways and in many places.