Content modelling

Structure is the strategy

Websites rot from the inside. Not the design, the content: programs described in six places, pages nobody dares delete, a CMS where finding the right field is tribal knowledge. It happens when content lives as pages instead of structure.

So we model first. Before design starts, we audit what exists and work out the actual types: what a program is, what a story is, how they relate, who maintains them. Pages become queries over that structure. It's the least glamorous phase of a project and the most consequential, because it decides whether the site still works in year five.

Programs that generate pages

Momentum's site had grown until courses and programs were indistinguishable from ordinary pages. Signup flows varied course to course, and nobody could say which pages were canonical. We rebuilt the foundation: courses and programs as structured, reusable models that generate their own pages. The organization has kept growing since; the model just keeps absorbing it.

Two websites, one structure

Vibrant Communities Calgary was maintaining two sites: its own, and Enough for All, Calgary's poverty reduction strategy. The relationship between them was unclear to everyone, including visitors. The fix was a model, not a merge: content recategorized as Levers, Stories, Campaigns, Resources, Articles, and Events, with a hierarchy that made one platform out of two brands. It has been easy to maintain ever since.