# A Content Model Is Not a Design System

DevFeed: [A Content Model Is Not a Design System](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/a-content-model-is-not-a-design-system-4283.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://alistapart.com/article/a-content-model-is-not-a-design-system/>)

Author: by Mike Wills

Published: 2021-09-23T14:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [A List Apart: The Full Feed](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/a-list-apart-the-full-feed.md>)

Topics: [Content Management System](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/cms.md>), [Bot](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/bot.md>)

Tags: [content](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/content.md>), [content-content-strategy](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/content-content-strategy.md>), [content-strategy](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/content-strategy.md>), [design-systems](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/design-systems.md>), [model](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/model.md>), [related-content](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/related-content.md>), [types](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/types.md>)

## AI overview

The article explains why a semantic, connected content model is essential to an omnichannel content strategy and should not be approached as a design system.

## Source excerpt

Do you remember when having a great website was enough? Now, people are getting answers from Siri, Google search snippets, and mobile apps, not just our websites. Forward-thinking organizations have adopted an omnichannel content strategy, whose mission is to reach audiences across multiple digital channels and platforms. But how do you set up a content management system (CMS) to reach your audience now and in the future? I learned the hard way that creating a content model--a definition of content types, attributes, and relationships that let people and systems understand content--with my more familiar design-system thinking would capsize my customer's omnichannel content strategy. You can avoid that outcome by creating content models that are semantic and that also connect related content. I recently had the opportunity to lead the CMS implementation for a Fortune 500 company. The client was excited by the benefits of an omnichannel content strategy, including content reuse, multichannel marketing, and robot delivery--designing content to be intelligible to bots, Google knowledge panels, snippets, and voice user interfaces. A content model is a critical foundation for an omnichannel content strategy, and for our content to be understood by multiple systems, the model needed semantic types--types named according to their meaning instead of their presentation. Our goal was to let authors create content and reuse it wherever it was relevant. But as the project proceeded, I realized that supporting content reuse at the scale that my customer needed required the whole team to recognize a new pattern. Despite our best intentions, we kept drawing from what we were more familiar with: design systems. Unlike web-focused content strategies, an omnichannel content strategy can't rely on WYSIWYG tools for design and layout. Our tendency to approach the content model with our familiar design-system thinking constantly led us to veer away from one of the primary purposes of a conte