Allow your content to outlive your website

I’ve helped more than a few organisations rebuild their websites over the years. In almost every case, hours were spent on colours, fonts, layouts and so on. But when the conversation turned to content management, the client would often barely care.

This is perhaps not surprising. When you’re paying for a website, the bit you feel like you’re paying for is the bit everyone sees. The bit only you and your staff see seems far less important.

However, I want to make the case in this post that you are probably thinking about it wrong.

How you store your content has repercussions far beyond how easy it is to make something bold.

Separate your content from your design

When you write in most website builders, you’re doing both at once. You’re typing words and choosing fonts, colours, spacing, columns and formatting. The visual editor locks your content to a specific design.

That works fine until you want to:

• Change the design without rewriting your pages
• Move the site to a different platform
• Read your own content in a different format (like a PDF or an eBook)
• Sleep at night knowing your words aren’t held hostage (maybe that one is just me)

When content and layout are separate, you write in plain text, or close to it. You don’t choose fonts or margins or colours. That’s handled by the site. You can add headings, images emphasis and similar structural elements. But you don’t specify how they should look.

You may add additional information (called metadata) to indicate how a post should be categorised, or when it was written, or who wrote it. But your content is kept separate from the design.

You say that a post was written by “Joe Blogs” but not that “Joe Blogs” should be written in small grey letters under the title.

Your words sit in one place. The structure sits in another. They don’t need to know about each other.

Why this matters for small organisations

It’s easy to see this as a technical detail that doesn’t affect you. But it actually changes the long-term cost, control, and stability of your site.

You own your content completely

Tight coupling means your words live inside a specific platform’s format. Migrate away, and you export a mess of formatting tags and broken links. Keep them separate, and your content is just… text. It lives anywhere. It opens anywhere. Nobody can lock it away.

Design changes don’t require a rewrite

Change your site’s look in five years? You only touch the design files. The content stays exactly as it is. This matters for organisations that publish regularly - blogs, annual reports, sermons, event archives, news and so on. The format might improve, but the words shouldn’t need re-writing.

It naturally limits complexity

When your words and your design are in the same editor, it’s all too easy to make things complex. Custom layouts, conditional formatting, visual blocks that do four things at once.

And ultimately, this forces a site to look and feel consistent. With too much control over the look of a page, each page starts to feel different.

It’s better for accessibility and longevity

Plain text content reads better. Screen readers handle it correctly. Print-friendly layouts work. PDF exports just work. Future formats will read it. The web changes constantly; plain content changes never.

What this looks like in practice

This site is built using my favourite static site builder: Hugo. But, that doesn’t matter because my content is just a folder full of files. This blog post you’re reading now, was written in a Markdown file:

---
title: Allow your content to outlive your website
date: 2026-05-08
description: >
    The single biggest decision you'll make for your site isn't about design.
    It's about keeping what you say separate from how it looks.
tags: 
    - simplicity
    - websites
---

I've helped more than a few organisations rebuild their websites over the years.
In almost every case, hours were spent on colours, fonts, layouts and so on. But
when the conversation turned to content management, the client would often
barely care.

This is perhaps not surprising. When you're paying for a website, the bit you
feel like you're paying for is the bit everyone sees. The bit only you and your
staff see seems far less important.

However, I want to make the case in this post that you are probably thinking
about it wrong.

How you store your content has repercussions far beyond how easy it is to make
something bold.

## Separate your content from your design

When you write in most website builders, you're doing both at once. You're
typing words *and* choosing fonts, colours, spacing, columns and formatting. The
visual editor locks your content to a specific design.

...

You’ll see there is a section at the top of the file containing information about the blog post. The date it was published, the title, a short description and the tags that are relevant.

Next, is the content. Just the content. No fonts or colours specified. No columns. Just the content.

If you decide to change the look of the site? You edit the templates. Your content will sit unaffected.

Want to move the site to another host? Copy the text files and templates. Done.

Need to turn your annual report into a handout? Export the same Markdown file to PDF. No formatting to break.

The trade-off

Of course, this isn’t about pretending it’s all simplicity. Whoever is writing your website content is probably used to Word, or at least something like it.

So, they might need to learn a new tool. That being said, it’s not hard. You can read the text above, right? And if you’re changing websites, you’re likely going to have to learn a new tool anyway. Why not make it one that isn’t tied to this iteration of your website?

Let me ask you a question

If you wanted to move your site, or change how it looks, in three years time, would you have to rewrite every post?

If the answer is yes, your content and your design are probably tied together. That is going to make updating your website down the line hard. Separating them might take some time, but you are investing in the future.

And it’s exactly the kind of future-proofing I like. Spend time now, let it pay off down the road.