Ship the launch. Keep room for version two.
Deadlines do not care about your perfect information architecture. The goal of a minimum viable content model is simple: editors can update what marketing will ask for, developers can render reliable pages, and you avoid re-modeling everything two weeks after launch.
Below is a pattern we see work for many brochure-plus-blog sites on API-first CMS platforms (ElmapiCMS included). Adapt names to your product, but keep the separation of concerns.
Table of Contents
- Principles
- Collection: Site settings (singleton-style)
- Collection: Pages
- Collection: Blog posts (optional but common)
- Collection: Team or people (optional)
- Collection: FAQs or legal snippets (optional)
- Defer until after launch
- Making this work in ElmapiCMS
Principles
- Globals are globals — Things that appear on every page (logo, default SEO, social links) should not be duplicated per page.
- Pages are pages — Marketing URLs map to structured records, not to a pile of unstructured HTML in a single field.
- Relationships beat copy-paste — If the same author or CTA appears in ten places, model it once and reference it.
- Fewer collections beats more — Early complexity slows editors down. Add collections when you feel pain, not anticipation.
Collection: Site settings (singleton-style)
Purpose: sitewide configuration editors touch often.
Typical fields:
- Site name, default title suffix
- Default share image
- Primary navigation (as structured items: label, URL, optional children)
- Footer columns or link lists
- Organization JSON-LD basics (name, logo URL, sameAs links)
Why it exists: without this, every page stores its own copy of “Twitter link,” and updates become a scavenger hunt.
Collection: Pages
Purpose: one record per primary URL (/pricing, /features, /contact).
Typical fields:
- Slug (unique)
- SEO group: meta title, meta description, OG image override
- Page sections — Prefer structured repeatable sections (hero, feature grid, testimonial strip) over one giant rich text blob. If you must ship fast, start with hero + body, then split sections after launch.
For deeper modeling ideas, see reusable page sections and blocks.
Collection: Blog posts (optional but common)
Purpose: dated content, RSS, SEO long tail.
Typical fields:
- Title, slug, published date
- Summary / excerpt
- Cover image
- Author (relation or text in v1)
- Categories or tags (pick one taxonomy to start)
- Body content
If you are not sure you need a blog at launch, skip it. You can add it in an afternoon if the CMS models collections cleanly.
Collection: Team or people (optional)
Purpose: /about pages and bylines without duplicating bios.
Fields: name, role, photo, short bio, optional social links.
Collection: FAQs or legal snippets (optional)
Purpose: homepage or pricing FAQs, repeatable accordions.
If you only have one FAQ section at launch, it can live as a repeatable group on the Pages record for /pricing instead of a standalone collection. Promote to its own collection when reuse appears.
Defer until after launch
You usually do not need on day one:
- Full localization — Add locales once copy workflow is real, not hypothetical.
- Complex approval chains — Start with roles (admin vs editor) and tighten later.
- E-commerce product catalogs — Unless you are actually selling SKUs at launch.
- Fine-grained page builders — Powerful, but slow to model and easy to misuse under time pressure.
Making this work in ElmapiCMS
If you are new to the product, start with getting started with ElmapiCMS, then sketch your collections in plain language before touching fields. For relationships and cardinality, our beginner guide to relations helps you avoid broken references when blog posts meet authors and categories.
The Friday deadline is not an excuse for throwaway modeling—it is permission to defer modeling you do not yet need. Ship the smallest structure that matches real pages on the sitemap, then iterate where editors feel friction.