Creating the content strategy and information architecture

Updated: Thu Apr 17 2025

Working as a writer, content strategist, and developer helped me understand how to orchestrate between the three roles.

Structuring content is always important. I appreciate even more why using metadata (front matter) is critical.

Who are my users?

Content goals

Content types

I created three main content types (page types):

Metadata

Most technical writers and content strategists are familiar with metadata (referred to in the SSG world as front matter and/or frontmatter). You can use it to define page titles, keywords, tags, and categories right out of the box. The real power comes by adding custom metadata; highly structured content expands the possibilities of the template engine and site generator.

Taxonomies

Collections in Eleventy are powerful metadata tools to display items on page(s) programmatically. Eleventy comes with the tags and categories by default. You can expand these to create your own frontmatter as well.

For example, on the homepage I wanted to loop through the lists of podcast posts, my skillset, and this series on static site generators. On the homepage and each landing page, I wanted to programmatically display them in a grid with their photo, title, description, and link. On each individual podcast page, the link to the mp3 is programmatically generated.

You can also use collections to filter your content once you have it structured with your metadata.

While I was building out the site there were grid template pages for each of those content types. Eventually I made the grid collection-agnostic.

Content reuse

Using metadata and collections enables reuse. Copy-pasted content across pages is a maintenance nightmare. Someone has to remember to update it, and also remember that content is pasted in several places. As I built out the site, I wanted to re-use the first sentence of each ‘details’ page to display as descriptions on the cards on the grid pages.

Exploration

There was a lot of experimenting and seeing what was what. Once I grasped how to use the metadata programmatically, it opened my eyes how much structured front matter makes a difference in how content is used, sorted, filtered, and displayed.

Then I added two json files of related webinars, podcasts, and other talks i’ve done, as well as the tools used for each of the skills. it was fun, and refreshing, and again, holy cow structured content.

Being on this side of the equation makes it clear how much structuring your content helps your developers.

It also helped me narrow my focus on skills, as well as tell a story across all of my content.

Separating content from presentation

Publishing cadence for the SSG series

As part of my site rollout, I wanted to have four solid blog posts ready on debut, with the plan to roll out the others in either small batches or individually to keep traffic coming to my site, and to show recruiters and employers that I was still actively updating my site and the series.

This meant I needed to set up a way to tell the SSG to display these four blog posts and skills I want to highlight. I created featured and featuredOrder metadata fields, so it’s easy to implement and maintain.