Web Content Management

Chapter 6. Content Modeling

At the risk of triggering bad memories, consider the form you have to complete at the local Department of Motor Vehicles when renewing your driver’s license. You’re envisioning a sheet of paper with tiny boxes, aren’t you?

But what if it wasn’t like that? Imagine that instead of a form, you just got a blank sheet of paper on which you’re expected to write a free-form essay identifying yourself and providing all the information you can think of. Then someone at the DMV sits down to read your essay and extract all the particular information the DMV needs. If the information isn’t there—for instance, you forgot to include your birthdate because no one told you to put it in your essay—they send you back to try again.

You might have thought it impossible to make the experience of renewing your driver’s license worse, but I’d wager that this process might accomplish just that.

Thankfully, the DMV has forms with separate boxes for you to input different information: your name, your birthdate, etc. These boxes even have labels describing them and prompts to ensure you enter the information in the correct format: there might be “mm/dd/yyyy” in the birthdate field, two dashes in the Social Security number field, and checkboxes for “male” or “female.”

The people who designed this form considered the range of information they needed from people, and then structured it. They broke it into separate boxes on the form, and took steps to ensure it was entered correctly. ...