Written by Dana Rock

If a website isn’t made of paper, why does it have pages?

Traditionally websites have been built like books. The “page” has long been the basic unit of content. But while this made sense in the past, when early web developers were building the first sites, we now don’t need to be limited by this vestigial approach.

The current Sussex web estate shows many of the common challenges for large organisations whose devolved web content has grown organically over time. There are pockets of excellent content, but overall the journey for web users is often fragmented with key content duplicated, missing or hard to find.

Time for a rethink

The University approached Pickle Jar Communications at the end of 2023 for help with the New Web Estate project.

Pickle Jar Communications is a consultancy which has worked with the education sector for over 17 years, helping universities and schools around the world develop a more strategic approach to their digital content.

From the beginning of the project we could see both the considerable size of the challenge. But also an equally sizable potential: to transform the web estate so that it could rightly showcase and serve such a world-class institution.

We set about understanding Sussex’s strategic needs for the web, gathering audience insights and conducting an in-depth audit of the website. Working collaboratively with the project team, this analysis enabled us to outline a new, smarter approach for the content of a new web estate.

Structured content: what it is and why it’s useful

Moving away from “pages”, a structured approach to content is like building a website out of Lego blocks.

Content is broken down into “content elements”. These are the smallest unit of information, for example a person’s name or contact details. These elements are used to build slightly larger “content clusters”, such as a contact details box, or a larger “content type”, such as a staff profile. Content elements can be used in multiple places where they are useful.

Crucially, there is a single source of information for the content elements. Someone’s name changed? It can be updated in all the places it appears on the site.

Structured content is beneficial because it:

• avoids duplication, reduces errors and improves efficiency by creating once and publishing everywhere with a single source of truth;
• makes content more intelligible to machines, improving SEO and AI readability;
• supports personalisation;
• increases sustainability, as it reduces the wastage of duplicate content.

Structuring Sussex’s content

Across a series of workshops, Pickle Jar collaborated with stakeholders to define the key content types and elements that would be used on the new website. This is like gathering the bricks and creating a blueprint for the new architecture.

We also developed a new web taxonomy. The taxonomy is a series of tags which can be used across the web content to link together related pieces of content. For example, it would enable someone browsing a particular subject area to see news and events relating to that area.

No doubt you have seen a web taxonomy in action when you’ve been browsing on a website which offers you “similar items” or “related news” on a given topic. Based on audience insights, it can significantly improve the user experience.

What this means for a new website

Shifting to a structured approach to content is a significant undertaking. From my experience of working with different organisations, the Sussex web estate project team should be applauded for their tenacity and commitment. I’ve been wholeheartedly impressed by their drive to create a better user experience.

There are still many stages to work through, including technical considerations and a rethink of website governance.

But the potential is right there: for Sussex to have a smarter web estate that hasn’t just grown from the past, but is fit for the future.