Create structured content models in Contensis to maintain multi-channel content quality

Creating effective digital experiences requires strong content standards – rules that ensure consistency and manageability across all platforms. These standards define essential requirements for content types, such as product pages needing specific elements like titles, descriptions, and images.

Structured content supports these standards by organising information into reusable blocks with metadata, separating content from design. This approach allows content to adapt seamlessly across platforms while maintaining brand consistency, preventing fragmentation and reducing errors.

Structured content fundamentally changes how we manage digital content by separating the content itself from its presentation. Rather than creating web pages by formatting text and images directly in a WYSIWYG editor, content is stored in modular fields – such as titles, summaries, body text, and metadata – which can be dynamically assembled into different layouts. This modular approach means content can be published across multiple platforms without repeated reformatting.

In a headless CMS like Contensis, these field collections are organised into content types, which serve as templates for creating specific kinds of content. For example, a blog post content type might include fields for the title, summary, body, author, and publication date.

One of the most powerful features is the ability to link related content entries together – instead of simply storing an author's name as text, you can create a direct link to their profile from a separate Person content type, ensuring information stays current and consistent.

This centralised management approach means updates only need to be made once to reflect across all platforms where the content appears, eliminating duplication and reducing the risk of outdated information. Through APIs, developers can retrieve specific content fields and arrange them as needed, while additional metadata and structured data formats like JSON-LD make the content more discoverable by search engines and AI systems, improving visibility in rich search results and across digital platforms.

Structured content models transform how organisations manage and deliver their content across channels, offering three key advantages that improve efficiency and user experience.

The first benefit is consistency across platforms. Because content is stored in modular pieces separate from design, it can be styled differently for various platforms without requiring rewrites. A university announcement, for example, can automatically adapt from a website banner to a mobile card or social media post while maintaining consistent branding and messaging.

The second advantage is simplified updates and improved scalability. With centralised management, content elements are stored once and reused wherever needed. When updating a person's profile in Contensis – changing their headshot and job title – these changes automatically reflect across all connected content, from blog posts to webinar promotions, eliminating the need for multiple manual updates.

Finally, structured content enhances user experience through tailored presentation and improved navigation. An online bookshop, for instance, can use structured content to create dynamic filtering systems where books tagged with details like category and format automatically generate intuitive navigation options, helping users quickly find what they need across any platform.

Creating structured content models in a headless CMS is all about building a solid foundation for your content. By breaking your content into modular, reusable pieces, you can maintain consistency, improve efficiency, and create experiences tailored to different platforms. Structured models allow you to adapt your content to meet the needs of your audience – whether they’re reading it on a desktop, scrolling on their mobile, or interacting through a voice assistant.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to building structured content models in Contensis, from identifying reusable elements to creating content types, adding metadata and taxonomy, and enabling multi-channel output. Whether you’re starting with a small, specific project or rethinking your entire content structure, these steps will help you get the most out of your content and make life easier for your editors and developers.

Before building your structured content model in Contensis, start by reviewing your existing content and identifying key reusable elements. Rather than trying to model your entire website or application in one go, it’s worth starting with an area that you think lends itself to being stored in a structured, reusable way.

While almost all content can benefit from being stored as structured content, it’s often easiest to start with things that are obvious candidates for being stored as ‘records’, such as events, people, news articles, or blog posts. Once you’ve decided on an area of content to model, look for patterns in your content to determine which pieces can be structured for consistency and reuse across different pages and platforms. If you do this, you’ll find even a small and discrete content model will quickly expand.

For example, a content type for an event might include the following fields:

• Name of event
• Date
• Venue
• Speaker
• Description
• Promotional image
• Tags

Whilst this could be a self-contained content type using just text, date and image fields, that would make it difficult to build relationships between events and wouldn’t make the most of the possibilities offered by structured content.

Instead of using plain text fields in our content type, we could make the Speaker and Tag fields links to other content types. Linking fields to other content types not only improves consistency, but also makes your content easier to update and reuse across different areas of your site. For example, if a speaker’s details change, you only need to update the appropriate Speaker entry, and the changes will automatically be reflected in all associated events.

It’s quite likely that somebody speaking at an event also is a member of a department in our organisation, writes blogs for our website, and is mentioned in news articles. We could make our Speaker content type far more useful if we renamed it "Person" and expanded it to include other useful information. This way we could use the same content type to add authors to our blog posts or to tag staff in news articles to allow advanced filtering in a news listing.

In Contensis, when you add a field that references another content type, you can give the field a different label to the content type you’re referencing. So, whilst we’re referencing the Person content type in our event, we can label the field Speaker to provide extra context to content editors when they are creating a new event. Similarly, in a Blog Post content type we could label the field Author and in our News Article content type we could have a field labelled Featured Staff Members.

If our organisation regularly uses the same venues for events, we could make a Venue content type as well. This way, we can easily build relationships between events at the same venue. If we’re really planning ahead, we could make this content type even more useful by renaming it "Location". That way we could use it in other content types – such as in a department page or in an employee profile – as our model expands.
In this scenario our content model might end up looking something like this:

It’s a good idea to do this stage of the content modelling process on a whiteboard or using sticky notes to begin with, as you’ll find yourself making frequent adjustments to your model as it expands.

Once you've identified the reusable elements in your content, the next step is to define content types in Contensis. These act as templates for content authors, with fields for the elements that make up a particular type of content. Your authors will create content by filling in the fields you’ve defined, making it easier to create consistent content at scale. You can add validation rules to fields and make certain fields required, making it impossible for authors to publish an event without a venue or with the date in the wrong format, or to create a profile for a new member of your team without adding a picture.

When building your content types, it’s important to select the correct field types and data formats to ensure quality and consistency.

For example:

• Use text fields for titles and short descriptions, but consider rich text fields for body content that may include formatting or links.
• Use date fields for publication dates or deadlines to ensure dates are entered and displayed consistently.
• Use entry picker fields to create relationships with other content types and allow authors to link to entries from those content types.
• Use read-only fields to store information pulled into Contensis from integrations with third-party systems that shouldn’t be edited by users.

While using the correct field types is essential to good content modelling, it’s just as important to choose field names that reflect how your editors naturally think about the content. Using field names that align with their mental models and your organisational vocabulary makes your content model easier to understand and reduces the chance of errors. For example, calling a field “Main Image” instead of “Primary Visual” is clearer and avoids confusion. The easier it is for editors to understand what each field is for, the quicker they can get on with creating content confidently and accurately.

Contensis allows you to use components to group reusable sets of fields within a content type. Unlike an entry, a component does not hold content, but is stored in the entry where the component is used. Components are especially useful for complex content models where the same group of fields is used multiple times or across multiple content types.

Using components simplifies maintenance, as updates to the component automatically apply across all content types where it is used. It also makes the editing experience more intuitive for content editors by grouping related fields together logically.

Contensis provides a variety of field validation settings designed to ensure that content is entered correctly and to help avoid the kind of embarrassing errors that occur when vital content is missing from front-end websites and apps. All validation rules have to be met before content can be published, so as long as you’ve carefully implemented validation settings when building your content type, it will be impossible for anyone to publish poor quality content.

The validation settings available in Contensis vary from field to field, but examples of useful validation rules include:

• Setting maximum and minimum character limits for titles and descriptions.
• Making mandatory fields like Headline, Lead Image, or Tags required to ensure no critical content is missed.
• Restricting image sizes to maintain quality and optimise performance.

By using appropriate field types and applying validation, you can standardise your content, reduce errors, and ensure that every piece of content meets your quality standards.

Where possible, include metadata and categorisation fields in your content types to enhance the searchability and relevance of your content.

It’s often worth grouping metadata fields into components that you can reuse across content types. This makes it easier to maintain your content model, as if you need to add or remove a field you can update the component centrally rather than having to locate and update the fields in multiple content types. It also makes it easier for developers, as they can reuse the code that retrieves the component data.

One of the most effective ways to categorise content is to create content entries to use as tags. This way if you need to store extra information about the category or subject in the future – such as an icon or description – you can simply expand the content type and maintain all of the existing relationships. You can also rename or otherwise update your category entries and the changes will apply to every entry they have a relationship with.

For example, a Course content type might have a field to select a subject from a set of entries created from a linked Subject content type. While these Subject entries could be as a simple as a single field for storing the name of the subject, they could be expanded to store:

• the contact details of the school responsible for that subject
• links to the locations of the buildings or facilities used by the faculty or department responsible for the subject
• a description of the subject
• a promotional image

This content could then be used to generate a landing page for each subject. And because each course is linked to a subject, it would be easy for a developer to show all of the courses associated with the subject on the landing page.

When you create structured content in Contensis, you’re building a system that supports publishing content consistently across multiple channels. By separating content from presentation, you ensure your content can be adapted for different devices, platforms, and use cases, all while maintaining consistency and quality.

Contensis allows you to set up rules for how content is presented on different platforms, ensuring your audience gets the best possible experience regardless of where they access your content. For example:

• Use image variations to display full-size images on desktop while automatically cropping or resizing them for mobile screens.
• Display a concise summary for a mobile notification or social media post, while keeping the full content for the main website.
• Dynamically assemble related content, such as linking speakers to events, or articles to topics, to provide a seamless user experience across all channels.

When building your content types, consider how content will appear on different channels and adjust the structure accordingly.

For example:

• A News Article content type might include additional fields for Open Graph metadata to ensure articles are optimised for social media sharing.
• An Event content type could include a dedicated mobile summary field to provide a short, snappy description tailored for app notifications.

When you create structured content in Contensis or any other headless CMS, you're building a system that supports publishing content consistently across multiple channels. So, to ensure your content types are genuinely fit for purpose, it's essential to test them with the people who will use them daily—your content editors. Their feedback will help you identify any usability issues, ensure the model meets their needs, and refine it to create an intuitive and efficient content authoring experience.

If possible, involve your content editors from the beginning of the content modelling process. They are the ones who understand the content best and can provide valuable insights into how it should be structured, tagged, and related.Involving editors early on in the process helps to:

• Ensure the content model aligns with real-world workflows.
• Highlight practical needs, such as preferred naming conventions or missing fields.
• Build a sense of ownership and collaboration, increasing the system's adoption and, hopefully, its success.

Before finalising the content model, work with editors to create sample entries using the draft model.

This hands-on exercise can reveal:

• Fields that are unclear or redundant.
• Validation rules that are too restrictive or missing.
• Gaps in the model where additional fields or components are needed.

Use these test entries to simulate common workflows, such as creating an event, tagging it with a speaker, and linking it to a location.

Ask editors to provide detailed feedback on their experience using the content model.

Key areas to evaluate include:

• Clarity: Are field names intuitive and descriptive? Do they align with the editor's mental model?
• Efficiency: Are there any repetitive tasks or unnecessary fields that slow down the workflow?
• Usability: Are related content entries easy to search for and select? Are components grouped logically?
• Validation: Do error messages provide helpful guidance? Are validation rules clear and relevant?

Use the insights gathered during testing to refine your content model.

This may include:

• Renaming fields or components to improve clarity.
• Adjusting validation rules to balance quality control with flexibility.
• Adding or updating content guidelines to provide more helpful information.
• Adding or removing fields based on editor needs.
• Improving the grouping of fields into tabs or components to streamline navigation.

Ensure the content model works effectively for all the intended scenarios.

For example:

• Can editors easily create and manage content for all channels, such as websites, apps, and social media?
• Are relationships between content types, like linking events to speakers or blog posts to authors, working as intended?
• Does the metadata provide enough flexibility for SEO and tagging?
• Testing across diverse scenarios helps ensure the model is robust and adaptable.

Once the content model is finalised, provide clear training and documentation to help editors understand how to use it effectively. While the aim should always be to make your content types as easy to use as possible, even the best-designed content models can be confusing to somebody unfamiliar with their context, such as a new starter at your organisation. Supplying editors with documentation that they can access as and when they need it is a more pleasant experience for everybody – they don't feel awkward or anxious about asking for help, potentially delaying content production, and you don't have to field questions that can easily be answered in a simple user guide.

Consider providing:

• Step-by-step guides for creating different types of content.
• Best practices for tagging and categorising content.
• Common pitfalls to avoid and how to resolve validation errors.

A content model isn't static. As your organisation's needs evolve, new platforms emerge, or editors identify pain points, revisit and adjust the model. Regular feedback loops with editors will ensure your content model remains relevant and user-friendly. Consider setting up an open Slack or Teams channel for editors to provide feedback on your content model or run monthly drop-in sessions where editors can seek help with issues or give feedback. By involving real editors in the testing process, you can ensure that your content model is practical and intuitive and that it continues to support the creation of high-quality, consistent content at scale.

Structured content models make life easier for everyone. They help your team work more efficiently, ensure your content stays consistent across platforms, and give you the flexibility to adapt to new channels and formats.

Contensis makes it simple to build these models, providing the tools you need to create high-quality, reusable content at scale. With intuitive tools for building content types, creating reusable components, and authoring structured content, it’s easy to deliver consistent, high-quality content at scale. Contensis’ API-first approach ensures your content is always ready for any platform, now and in the future, while its user-friendly interface and custom workflows make life simpler for your editors.

Ready to take control of your content and improve your multichannel experiences? Schedule a demo with us or contact our team to learn how Contensis can help you build structured content models that save time, reduce errors, and keep your content working seamlessly across every channel.