Twenty-five championships,nobody treading on toes.
Content architecture is the least glamorous part of a project and the part that decides whether the site is still usable in three seasons.
When the British Automobile Racing Club commissioned their new site, the design was the straightforward part. We had their brand guidelines and a blank sheet. A fortnight of work and everyone was happy with how it looked.
The hard part was structural, and it took considerably longer. During a normal racing season BARC run upwards of 25 championships, all generating results, news, galleries and events. Multiple people across the organisation need to keep that current, often on the same weekend, often about overlapping things.
The failure mode
Sites like this do not collapse on launch day. They degrade. Someone posts a race report under the wrong championship. Someone else re-enters the same event because they could not find the existing entry. Two people edit the same standings table an hour apart and one set of changes vanishes.
Six months later there are duplicate categories, orphaned pages and a shared spreadsheet that tracks who is allowed to touch what. The site still works. Using it has become a job.
The difference between a site that lasts three seasons and one that needs a spreadsheet to operate.
What we designed instead
We modelled the content around the real relationships rather than the page structure. A result belongs to an event, an event belongs to a championship, a championship has a season. Everything else, whether that is news, galleries or standings, hangs off those, so a single entry surfaces everywhere it is relevant without anyone re-entering it.
- Cross-section and category content populates automatically wherever it belongs.
- Editors work inside their own championship without being able to disturb another.
- There is exactly one place to enter any given fact.
- Adding a new championship is configuration, not development.
The site handles around 30,000 visitors a month, and at that volume both speed and ease of use matter. It has since grown to include an online store for memberships and renewals, which slotted into the same structure rather than sitting beside it.
How to spot it going wrong early
The warning sign in any build is a content model that mirrors the navigation. Navigation changes constantly, because it reflects what you want to promote this quarter. Structure should reflect what things actually are, which changes far more slowly.
If your CMS has a page type called ‘homepage feature’, the model is describing a layout rather than a thing. That is the moment to stop and redraw it, because it is much cheaper now than after three seasons of content has accumulated on top.
Three more
worth the time.
Nobody tells you that you have been deprioritised. You notice the calls take longer to come back, and that the person who pitched you is on somebody else’s account now.
Every business runs on workarounds it stopped noticing years ago. Most of them exist because building the right thing used to be unaffordable. That constraint has moved.
If something other than a human reads your page first, then how you structured it matters nearly as much as what you said.