Insights / Content
June 18, 2026 · 6 min read
Content models for departments that do not share a style guide.
A style guide assumes a shared newsroom. Cities, districts, and campuses do not have one. Parks writes differently from the clerk, and both of them are right about their readers. A content model has to absorb that without giving every office a blank page.
Model the repeating things
Agendas, alerts, locations, people, programs, and services repeat. News does too, but news is where teams go to hide a service. If a permit explanation is a news post, it will be buried by Thursday’s photo. Give the permit a type, with cost, eligibility, and a start link as fields. Give the photo a news type. Do not make them share a body field and a prayer.
Let voice vary inside a frame
Departments can write in their own register. The frame stays fixed: title, summary, who it is for, the action, the contact. That is enough consistency for a resident moving from parks to utilities. It is not so much consistency that a program coordinator feels edited into communications-speak.
Fields are kinder than brand police. People will fill a field. They will route around a scolding.
Decide who owns the exception
Some pages are one-offs: a capital project, a bond, a centennial. Give them a campaign type with an end date. When the date passes, the page leaves the homepage without a meeting. The model fails when every exception becomes a new template and every template becomes someone’s unofficial CMS.
Start with the five types that cover most of the calls. Add the sixth when an editor hits a wall, not when a workshop invents it.