Seven telltale signs you didn’t hire a content architect

Every content strategist knows these signs. They tell us when an expert didn’t design our content architecture. And tell us there’s more fun to come.

1. The team describes your content architecture as XML over NoSQL

Content architecture isn’t specific to technologies or vendors like Adobe or projects like WordPress. In fact, that’s like missing the point. Content architects design it independently from technologies and express it through them.

2. Folders and file paths are your taxonomy

Content architects know the way you store content is different from the way you organize it. You can’t adequately tag or connect pieces of content by their folder names and paths. They aren’t meaningful to people or the context of an experience.

3. You have a node called content and a node called text

When there’s not enough distinction between concepts, it’s like throwing your content into a dumpster of ambiguity. A single category should capture similar entities and abstract them from nonessential differences. A content architect describes nodes that are “mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive.”

4. You have 7 types of article templates

A content architect decomposes all your content. From that, they create a content model to encompass the possible ways of combining components into as few templates as possible. Often, one article template can meet all your display needs.

5. A single piece of content covers multiple topics

Your CMS should have controls in place for creating and consistently applying topics. Without that, writers create content that sends mixed signals and duplicates to search engines.

6. Content conditionality drives decisions from too low a level

Good content architecture is designing at an optimal level to enable broad solutions and automation. A content architect solves holistically and works to avoid bottlenecks and manual errors that happen when you start too low.

7. A menu list has 60 items to scroll

A content architect designs structures for dynamically filtering them into relevant, manageable options.