Gerald watched his nephew build the website. It took about a week, on and off. Gerald made coffee. The nephew clicked things. A website appeared.
Gerald could not have told you what the nephew actually did. He saw a font get chosen. He saw some photos get uploaded. He saw the nephew frown at the screen for twenty minutes over something that turned out to be the menu. At the end of the week there was a website and Gerald was grateful and that was more or less that.
Here is what Gerald did not know, and what the nephew — if we are being honest — did not think to explain, possibly because he had never thought to separate it himself:
A web page is not one thing. It is six things. Six completely independent concerns, six different sets of decisions, six layers that can each be changed without touching the others — if, and this is the important part, you build it that way from the start.
Most tools encourage you not to. They collapse the six into one convenient surface, easy to start, increasingly difficult to change. This feels like a feature. It is a trap with a very friendly interface.
The six are these.
Content is the reason anyone came. It is the idea the page is supposed to express — the article, the event listing, the product description, the mission statement, the thing you actually needed to say. Everything else exists to serve it. You have seen websites with no content — beautiful, expensive, carefully designed websites where you arrived, looked around, and left without learning anything. Someone was very proud of those sites. Their visitors were not impressed. Content is not decoration. It is the whole point.
Technology is the foundation. It is the platform, the hosting, the software stack, the decision about what engine is running underneath everything else. Gerald's nephew made this decision on day one, probably in about four minutes, based on what he already knew how to use. It determines what is possible before a single word is written. Change it later and you are not renovating — you are moving to a different building.
Style is how the site looks. The colors, the fonts, the visual language, the skin. It is the paint on the walls. Done properly, you can repaint without touching the furniture. Many people believe Style is the whole job of building a website. It is one sixth of the job, and not the most important sixth.
Layout is where things are on the page. The bookshelf, not the books. The arrangement of regions and blocks and columns — the decisions about what appears where, in what order, on what kind of screen. You can move the shelves without changing a word of content. You can have the same content arranged completely differently on a phone than on a desktop. Layout and Content are independent. In a well-built system, neither one knows what the other is doing.
Navigation is how people find things. The menus, the paths, the search, the wayfinding. It is the signs, not the rooms. Change the signs and the rooms stay where they are. Build navigation poorly and it doesn't matter how good the content is — people will not find it, and they will blame the website, which will seem unfair but is also correct.
Access is who can do what. Who can read. Who can write. Who can publish. Who can change the navigation but not the style. Who can do everything except the things only the owner can do. Access is the quietest of the six and the most important to get right before anyone else touches the system. Gerald's nephew probably left this set to the defaults. The defaults are fine until they aren't.
These six are independent. That is the whole point.
When a tool collapses them — when changing a font also changes the layout, when moving a block also affects the navigation, when the content and the style are baked together into the same template — you have lost something you did not know you had. You have lost the ability to work on one thing without worrying about the other five.
Gerald's nephew did not think about this. The tool he used did not ask him to. The tool made the six invisible, which felt like simplicity and was actually just deferred complexity. Gerald will discover this the first time he wants to change something that turns out to be connected to everything else.
A proper content management framework keeps the six separate. It does this by asking uncomfortable questions before you build. What is this content? Where does it live? Who can see it? How is it arranged? What does it look like? How do people find it?
Six questions. Six jobs. One system that knows the difference between them.
This book is organized around these six concepts. Every chapter lives in one of them. Once you can see the six — really see them, as separate things with separate concerns — the whole project becomes manageable. You are not building one incomprehensible thing. You are building six understandable things that happen to work together.
Gerald's nephew could have explained this. He might explain it yet.