Component clarity: A strategic approach to modern CMS components

Modern websites are generally built to provide flexible, drag-and-drop tools for creating pages. This means you have a set of building blocks (aka components) that you can use to create your content. Often these come with options for styling and can be used to create more visual content that breaks up the monotony of walls of text.

While this sounds great, components can also introduce issues: lack of clarity about which component to use when and decision overload for content editors. In this session, we'll use examples from several college and university websites to show you how to better align your components with your content strategy, as well as tips for creating a better content editing experience. We use lots of examples from college and university websites to show you how some adjustments to your components can have a big impact.

We’ll cover:

• How to audit your existing components (and why this is so important).
• Using content strategy to identify missing components that you should create.
• Best practices for making components easier to update.
• Aligning components with accessibility and brand compliance.
• How to build a content strategy when components are pre-defined by your campus-wide CMS.