Responsive Web Design, Part 1 (2015)

Content Choreography In RWD

Giving Up: When Everything Is Just A Big Mess Forever

Not all content is precise and patterned. There are some types of content that defy organization: blobs that don’t want to be chunked, or unique information that doesn’t have a repeating pattern because it’s the only one of its kind.

At some point in every project, I have to remind myself: some information belongs in blobs. Data (numbers, measurements, and taxonomy) lends itself to patterns and chunking; but content (essays, descriptions, and stories) is inherently blobby. Those kinds of information are already as faceted as they’re going to get. When I can’t break a piece any smaller, the frustration usually leads to a realization that the information should stay as a blob. It’s not a failure of a content model to include a large WYSIWYG <textarea> for authors to fill in with freeform content.

When I reach that point and throw up my arms and yell, “FINE. BE THAT WAY!”, I circle back to reuse. What else do we need to do with this content, that having it as a blob prevents us from doing? Content models only exist to make the site better for my authors and my customers — they don’t have to fit other people’s use cases. Often all I really need from a piece of content is a small summary I can use as a teaser on other pages, or a taxonomy field to create a relationship to other sections of the site. The content model may end up being only a title, teaser, and body field. That’s fine, as long it serves the needs of my site.

My approach is similar when I’m dealing with one-off content, which has no repeating patterns because it’s the only instance of that information. The homepage of most sites is a perfect example — from a pure content model perspective, it doesn’t make sense to build a model that will only have one entry. A single page of unique content could be hand-coded, and that’s a good solution if the budget is tight and the information doesn’t change very often.

But I’m not building models as an intellectual exercise, I’m doing it to support this organization and its responsive site experience. We’ve already talked about the cruelty of making non-coders understand HTML to make simple text updates to their content, and on the homepage the stakes are high — unclosed <div>s and wrongly sized images will break the entire layout, and I will get panicked calls from executives late at night.

If authors are going to be updating the homepage content, I’ll often create a “homepage” content type in the CMS, breaking down that single page into individual fields and sections to make editing the content a safe and painless experience. Sure, there’s only ever going to be a single homepage, and none of that content is being reused in other channels, but guess what? There is no content model police. I will support my site experience and my authors over the theoretical ideals of what content models are for any day.