After a solid 25 years of the internet as we know it, many website managers are finding it hard to keep their heads above water while managing information. 

This is made more difficult when websites are based on how their organisation is structured internally – through its departments, offices and areas of activity. As the sprawl of noise grows, static sections with their own masses of HTML become harder to adapt. 

It’s easy to see how, for a big organisation such as a university, this way of working can quickly get out of hand and result in duplicate internal work – and worse, duplicate content that misdirects users in their goals. 

The reality is most big organisations with aging web estates are now in the same boat. Left unchecked, their content sprawl (or squall, to continue the analogy) threatens to overwhelm their vessel, like waves crashing over them at sea. 

Approaching 21^st-century content 

There are several ways to manage this, including structuring teams differently to manage content, as researched by the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Although this research dates back to 2011, it acknowledges different ways to bring people together to manage vast amounts of information. 

The most appealing way from a content team’s perspective is to centralise everything. This looks good on paper but raises a lot of questions around organisational culture. 

Another way is to accept a devolved way of working – similar to how large, collegiate universities operate, such as Cambridge, which has millions of web pages and thousands of sections. To change this would mean fundamentally changing centuries of organisational culture (in Cambridge’s case, over 700 years’ worth). That’s basically impossible. But Cambridge is Cambridge; the commercial drivers for change are more pressing at Sussex and other slightly-less renowned institutions. 

The connected approach 

A third way, as covered previously on this blog, is to dispense with the notion of a website based on discrete pages. Instead, the author, Dana Rock of Pickle Jar Communications, argues that we can reimagine content as smaller building blocks that can connect together in a variety of ways, across various structures and platforms. The beauty here is that individual pages do not need to be owned by particular departments (but some content elements could be). 

The challenge now is turning Pickle Jar’s theory into practice. 

Take for instance a page of calendar dates. It can be a single solid page of information (such as “Calendar dates for 2024/2025”) or a series of connected smaller elements (such as “Teaching ends”, “Graduation”, etc) that can be curated to fit together within a web page, or across several web pages, or within an app, or on a screen in a reception area…

Ahead of knowing exactly which CMS we will use to do the job, we have already started sketching out details of how this could work. The image above crudely shows the example of term dates on the left of the image as content elements within a data list within a CMS, and on the right are a couple of examples of where those elements could appear within cells in a table on a term dates page or even as inline elements within body copy on a page about assessments. 

Even going through these steps reveals pinch points and issues with the process, and flags questions around how such content would be edited, but it also reveals massive opportunities. If a date changes on a set of pages (see the example of “11 April 2025” in the image), it’s feasible for someone to be able to change this directly, without affecting the content around it. However, with the example of “Teaching ends”, you would need rigorous governance to avoid inline text becoming nonsensical quite quickly. 

Managing connected content 

Clearly a more centralised approach would be essential to making this work, but it wouldn’t need to be all-or-nothing, as previously discussed in a post about cultivating a network of editors. 

We are some way off knowing exactly how the governance of this will pan out, but it’s a big departure from what we’ve been doing so far. 

Whatever happens, we need to find a way to manage content systematically. And we’re not alone. Most organisations will either need to make peace with their existing content model and formalise it or find a new way. If they don’t do anything, they could find themselves in even choppier waters.