In previous posts we’ve explored the concept of connected content, where your website content is broken down into the smallest units of information so it can be reassembled in a headless environment across different platforms.

If that’s complete jargon to you, first check out a beginner’s guide to connected content and thoughts on managing website content systematically.

I’ve been conveying this work to internal stakeholders in a similar way, outlining the work much as I describe it in a short video about connected content on the New Web Estate project web page.

Let’s now cover how we’ve understood the building blocks we need for a new CMS, looking at the key “products” of the organisation and moving through to more technical considerations that need covering fully in another post.

An organisation as a set of products

Most organisations are the sum of their products – for instance, an airline is the sum of the flights, package holidays and car hire add-ons that it offers, as well as supplementary products like seat upgrades, extra baggage and so on.

The idea of a university having “products” is probably toe-curling for some employees because, ideologically to some minds, education should not be commodity, but the reality is most of its activities come with a price attached, which people pay for.

These products form the basic “types” of content that will exist on our website, including:

• courses
• facilities, such as on-campus accommodation or venue hire
• events
• research activities, such as projects or business collaborations.

As discussed in the posts linked above, all types of content can be broken down into its smallest constituent parts. At Sussex, we’ve called each smallest part an “element”. For instance, in a course type, we could have a start-date element or a title element. We’ve also gone for an intermediate category called a “group”; a ranking (such as First in the world for Development Studies) would be an instance of the ranking group, comprising the ranking-name element, ranking-value element, plus others. These groups of elements within the CMS can be pulled into “components” – the visual manifestation of the content – and then appear across the website in some snazzy design.

The course content type has a lot of elements and some groups within it, and we spent a lot of time with Pickle Jar Communications plotting out what those elements would be. We’ve now refined the list down and you can see a snapshot of how that looks below.

Value-added content

After doing this with several key content types, we started to see some overlaps emerge. For example, the title element could be used on course, but also facility – the difference would be the instance of each title, such as title=biology-bsc or title=veg-bowl-cafe. These overlaps were numerous to the extent that, by the time we’d covered our main products, there weren’t many new elements to be discovered.

At this point, we examined the content we have that’s designed to add value, provide support or inspire users in some way. Rather than listing elements out exhaustively, with more general content such as careers advice it was a more exploratory process (see below).

Here we’re sketching out how this information could and should look as composable, connected content, to see if anything new comes up.

With this example, we realised some kind of earnings group would be useful. The benefit here is that earnings information could feasibly appear on an instance of the career type, such as becoming a civil engineer, as well as part of an instance of the course type, such as for engineering.

Technical considerations

This process has thrown up a range of technical thoughts, such as how forms would work in this model, how connected elements work on news items that need to stay the same after being published, or how Google would index sizeable amounts of content that appears across more than one page or location.

We’ve been adding these questions to a document and will revisit them as we go through the process.

Joining the dots but knowing where to stop

It is naive to think we can make all our content connected in this way, but we’re aiming to increase the proportion we do connect up quite significantly.

There is also a balance to be struck between what is useful to connect up, and what isn’t, as well as knowing what level of granularity to stop at. In a perfect world, would it be useful to break every single member of staff’s name down into first name and last name? And, if you could, is the website CMS the right place to be doing that?

Likewise, how many elements do you create? Is the body element enough to cover all body text? Would having elements for career-overview or study-skills be useful to classify on their own? Or would they just run as body text?

It’s worth remembering that any connected model would just be the beginning of the next phase. New types and elements can be added all the time. The art of this work is knowing where to leave gaps to explore later, to continue building a connected model in a sustainable way.

Aligning internal thinking

As you go through this process, you realise a lot of the work of connecting content is largely a matter of perception. One person’s element could be another person’s group, where they just run in several paragraphs and style some headings into one element. There’s a balance to be struck; make it too prescriptive or complicated and the model is hard to maintain, but make it too loose or informal and you risk new instances of body elements containing 2,000 words and a ton styling plus an instance of hero-pullquote acting as a title because an editor prefers the font.

This is where good governance comes into play, and where solid training and empathetic communication is essential. There’s no way a model like this could be sustained across 500 editors dipping in and out of a new CMS now and again. But equally it’s not realistic for an organisation like Sussex to centralise all website activity into a division-sized super-team. It hasn’t been for nothing that, alongside the practical aspects, I’ve been ruminating over feminine ethics, emergency resourcing parallels and the third space (makes me the life and soul of most parties) in a bid to help coalesce a group of people capable of maintaining and sustaining this model.

Plugging it all in

Back to the tangible reality of types, groups and elements – the next step will be building this connected model in a new CMS, with the help of an implementation agency.

By this point, we will have a clear picture of what those types, groups and elements look like (listed in a massive spreadsheet), as well as a good understanding of what we need to plug into this new content model – listed in several massive spreadsheets as a content audit.

We’ll share more about how we’ve audited the existing content of our website soon, as well as more about the new CMS.