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CMS & Content

Content Modeling

Content Model

Portrait of Lukas Horvath, co-founder of Roelu Studio
Lukas HorvathCo-founder

What is Content Modeling?

Content modeling is the process of defining the structure of your content before it lives in a CMS. You decide what types exist (page, post, author, product, case study), what fields each one has (title, body, image, author reference), and how those types relate to each other. The result — the content model — is the schema that the CMS, the front-end, and the marketing team all share.

Why it matters

Bad content models are why marketing teams hate their CMS. Fields that don't match how the team writes. Categories that overlap. Three different ways to add an author, none of them right. A good content model maps to how the business actually communicates — product lines, regions, audiences, campaigns — so editors find what they need without thinking. Strategy before design. We don't sketch until we know why. Content modeling is where that strategy gets encoded. Skip it and every redesign starts by undoing the last one.

How it works

Start with an inventory: what content does the business publish today, and what does it need to publish in the next two years? Group it into types. For each type, decide the fields — what's required, what's optional, what references another type. A case study probably references an author, an industry, and a product. Sketch the model in a doc or directly in code. Stress-test it against real edge cases: a co-authored post, a product without an image, a campaign in three languages. Once the model holds up, encode it in the CMS schema. The Studio writes itself from there.

Related terms

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