Adding content to a new website

What are the 5 main content types?

Services 

These might be split into groups such as "sectors", "services" etc. They explain what you do to the audience.

People 

Biographies of the key team members, again potentially split into groups such as "Senior management". These can be pulled onto listing pages, into articles as a key contact, and as authors of content. 

Articles

Guides, Blogs, News etc. Anything written by you, for your audience. 

Events 

Events you host, such as webinars, round tables, conferences, etc.

Pages 

Used to house static content on your site. This consists of anything that isn't a service, person, article, event, or anything that can be added using the admin menu. 

Creating the content on the site

All content is entered in two stages.  First, the CMS record is created in the back end system along with any “metadata” such as categorisation, article type, author etc.

Once the record is saved, the content is all managed through the interactive front end editor.  This allows you to add and edit content elements (text, images, forms etc) live on the page as you browse the site.

A logical order for content creation

At the core of the system is the ability to categorise content consistently by linking it to services and people.  To minimise the amount of editing we would suggest that content is entered in the following order: 

Step 1:  Services and Locations

This is the best place to start.  Pretty much all the other content will be categorised back to these areas. Add the "sections" first so that you can classify the “services” as you add them.  Then, add the offices in the locations module. 

If you don't have all the details, set up a "stub" entry with the name and slug so that the services and locations appear in the classification sections.

Step 2: People

People are connected to addresses and articles, so it helps if they are set up early on in the process.  Again, if you don’t have all the details, at least get the name and contact details uploaded so that you have a placeholder to connect to.

Step 3: Articles

Articles need to be categorised to services and people so it’s best to have those set up first in order that you can do that when you enter the article details.

Step 4: Events

These are similar to articles.  They will be classified to services and potentially have a "Host" that links them to the people section.

Step 5: Pages

These can be set up at any time as there generally aren’t a lot of dependencies between them and the other content on the site.

Step 6: Categories

Some sites might also use "categories".  These can be useful for classifying articles or events where you want to associate them with a topic that doesn't naturally fit into the services structure. 

Brexit and COVID-19 have been good examples of this.  They are not "services" but there is a need to show related articles or events their on hub/landing pages.

If you are migrating content from an existing site, that requires categories to be set up then do that at the same time as you create the services and locations in step 1.