Sara Wachter-Boettcher

Care about content? Better copy isn't enough. As devices and channels multiply—and as users expect to relate, share, and shift information quickly—we need content that can go more places, more easily. Content Everywhere will help you stop creating fixed, single-purpose content and start making it more future-ready, flexible, reusable, manageable, and meaningful wherever it needs to go.

Strategy and Structure For Future-Ready Content

Content Everywhere

Jaydee (she/her)

If you need content to appear differently on different outputs, it likely needs to be its own chunk.

Before you go barreling down the hall to make demands, take a moment to understand where this crowd is coming from. Your content model shows how information will be entered into the CMS and displayed to users on the other end, while your developers' idea of a model likely comes from training in relational database modeling. This means that rather than thinking about how a user will experience the content or even how an editor will enter it, they are often thinking about structures with rigid definitions and roles.

But what's critical to your content isnt how the back end works; it's whether the desired effect can be achieved for both your CMS users and your audience. In other words, make sure your developers know you're less interested in following the letter of your content model than respecting its spirit.

As you're evaluating the existing process and considering how it could be improved, you should keep several things in mind:

"Over the last 10 years, both the size and scope of Web projects increased to eng ffectively with digital consumers. That created a staggering demand for time data and content that I call A-class: automated, accurate, aggregated, accessible. auditable, and always available. However, the large majority of business content isn't A-class; it's unstructured and inaccessible." — Cleve gibbon 

Content Everywhere quotes

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