Content model · Information architecture
A content model that turned a pile of pages into a map
For a global enterprise software company, the instrument that let us classify every page, see how the content actually connected, and rebuild the taxonomy around ideas instead of one-offs.
The problem
The site had grown the way big sites do: one page at a time, each made in isolation, with no shared way to say what a page was, what it held, or what it linked to. That makes reorganization impossible, because you cannot restructure what you cannot see. Before any taxonomy work could start, we needed a consistent way to inventory and classify everything already there.
What I built
I designed a content model: one governed template with a variant for each content type. For every page it captured the same core record, including the cards and links pointing out to other pages, which is the part that later mattered most. Standardizing the record also standardized the quality bar, and because the whole team authored inside it, I built the review flow right into the model so a page moved cleanly from draft to live and the color always showed whose turn it was.
One governed template per content type
What every page recorded
A shared, color-coded review flow
Anonymized reconstruction of the model I built. Content types shown are representative.
What it enabled
Once every page was described the same way, the individual records rolled up into a full inventory and, more valuable, a relationship map. For the first time we could see how the content actually connected. We used those relationships to reorganize the site from a set of isolated, one-off pages into a logical taxonomy of connected ideas, so related content finally sat together and led somewhere.
The consolidation was dramatic. We inventoried roughly 1,500 pages and reduced them to about 500 without dropping a single piece of content, then wrote 127 new pieces to fill the gaps the map made visible. The client kept the old URLs live for SEO, so the new pages had to earn their traffic on their own. They did: on average they outperformed the pages they replaced by 41% on unique visitors and time on page.
Conceptual illustration of the reorganization. The client’s actual inventory and map are confidential.
My role
I designed and built the model and its per-type templates, defined the classification schema and the review workflow, and ran it with the team through the inventory and into the reorganization.