What is your developer-dependent CMS actually costing you? Calculate your costs and get a full report
What is your developer-dependent CMS actually costing you? Calculate your costs and get a full report
Content Operations
How to write content that lives in fields: write for the field, use fields not formatting, write once and link it, and keep rich text for prose.
In Agility, content is stored in fields, not on a page. A blog post isn't one long document; it's a title, a summary, an author, a date, an image and a body, each in its own field defined by a content model. Your website, and any app or channel your developers connect, decides how those fields look.
That changes how you write. You aren't designing a page; you're filling in pieces that may appear in several places, in several layouts, some of which don't exist yet. This article covers the habits that make structured content work.
If the terms are new, start with Intro to Content for Editors and Pages vs Content.
Every field has a job. Before you write, ask where the field is likely to show up.
| Field | Where it might appear | Write it so that... |
|---|---|---|
| Title | Page heading, listing cards, browser tab, search results, links from other pages | it makes sense on its own, with no surrounding text |
| Summary or description | Listing cards, search results, social shares, email digests | it says what the reader gets, in one or two sentences, without repeating the title |
| Body | The detail page | it can assume the reader has seen the title, but not the summary |
| Image alt text | Screen readers, and in place of the image if it fails to load | it describes what the image shows or does, in context |
| Call to action label | A button | it says what happens next ("Download the guide", not "Click here") |
If you don't know where a field is used, ask your developer, or check the site in Preview. A short written note from your developers on what each field is for saves everyone time.
Named mistake: the summary that is the first paragraph. Copying the opening paragraph into the summary field makes listings read like truncated articles. Write the summary separately.
If something has a meaning, it belongs in a field, not in formatting.
Named mistake: the field you wish you had. When you find yourself repeating the same workaround (always bolding the first line, always pasting the same disclaimer), that's a request to change the content model. Raise it with whoever owns your models.
The biggest advantage of structured content is reuse. If the same text appears in two places, it should usually live in one item that both places link to.
See Components with Content that is shared across your site and Reusing Content across Multiple Web Properties.
Named mistake: copy and paste. Two copies of the same facts drift apart the first time someone updates only one. Link instead of copying.
When you publish a page or content item, its nested linked content is published with it by default (shared linked content is not). If you edited a nested item but aren't ready for it to go live, tick Publish this item only in the Publish prompt. See Previewing, Publishing, and Content States.
The same item may appear on a desktop page, a phone, a listing card and somewhere else your team adds later.
Rich text fields are for flowing text: paragraphs, lists, links and the occasional image or table of data.
If your site has more than one locale, some fields may be marked Constant across all languages by your developers. Those values are shared by every locale on purpose, so change them knowing it affects every language. See Working with Localized Content.
Writers can only follow these rules if the content model lets them. If you design content models, see Content Modeling Strategy and Content Models for how to choose fields, lists and relationships.
