Content modeling for beginners

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Introduction

Learning by Doing – Optimizely Build Series is a YouTube series where I am building a fictional website called TasteTrail, food discovery and recipe website using Optimizely CMS 12. 

In this episode, I have deep dived into Content Modeling &  focused on what we learned—the strategic thinking, trade-offs, and best practices while shaping our content model.



Content Modeling Is Strategic:


Content modeling was approached as a strategic exercise, not just a technical one. 

It’s about aligning content structure with:

  • User experience
  • Personalization goals
  • Scalability and governance
  • Editorial workflows

Hybrid modeling approach was chosen—starting with a top-down vision and refining it bottom-up based on real content and user behavior.

Foundation First

Started by defining BasePage and BaseBlock to centralize shared properties like SEO metadata and display settings. 

This top-down design gave us consistency across all content types.

Key Learnings:

  • Use GroupName to organize fields into intuitive tabs.
  • Keep GUIDs stable across deployments.
  • Controlled vocabularies (via selection factories) prevent editorial chaos

Taxonomy Is a Power Tool

Next step was to model taxonomy using Optimizely Categories, 


It was split into three subtrees: Cuisine, Dietary, and Tags. 


This structure powers:

  • Navigation
  • Faceted search
  • Personalization

Bottom-up refinement helped us evolve the taxonomy as real recipes were added. 


For example, “South Indian” was introduced after seeing regional diversity in content.

Structured Content

The RecipePage is the heart of TasteTrail website. 


It includes:

  • Core fields: Description, Servings, Prep/Cook Time
  • Taxonomy: Cuisine, Dietary, Tags
  • Blocks: Ingredients (IngredientItemBlock), Steps (RecipeStepBlock)
  • Media: Thumbnail, Gallery
  • Validation: Servings > 0, at least one ingredient and cuisine

We started with a structured model, but kept it extensible—adding ratings and favorites later on. 

Media Needs Structure Too

Modeled both images and videos as structured media types:

  • RecipeImage: JPG, PNG, WebP + AltText
  • RecipeVideo: MP4, WebM + Transcript

This top-down approach ensures accessibility, SEO, and editorial consistency.

Lesson: Media isn’t just decoration—it’s content. Treat it with the same as other content types.

Controlled Vocabularies Improve Quality

Fields like Difficulty use selection factories to enforce valid values: Easy, Medium, Hard.


Why create Selection Factories:

  • It Prevents typo errors and avoids inconsistent data
  • It Improves filtering & analytics
  • It Overall enhances content editor experience

Search & Filters Must Be Modeled Early

Indexed key fields and designed filters for:

  • Cuisine & Dietary (multi-select)
  • Difficulty (selection factory)
  • Time (numeric ranges)

 This bottom-up tuning was driven by real user behavior.

Personalization Is Behavior-Driven

Visitor Groups were created  based on user actions—like viewing ≥3 Indian recipes. 

These groups was then personalize the teaser blocks on the Home Page.


Key Insight:
Taste profiles were not hardcoded or decided at the beginning instead it evolved over time by user behavior.

This information can be stored into profiles and then be used to map them to personalization rules.

Lessons Learnt ?

Below are the learnings from the content modeling journey :

  • Content modeling is strategic not just technical and it defines UX, personalization, and helps with scalability.
  • Hybrid modeling brings best of both approaches: top-down for structure, bottom-up for adaptability.
  • Taxonomy, blocks, and media types must be modeled with intent.
  • Search and personalization should be part of the modeling conversation from day one.

Watch the Full Episode



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