The Informed Life Andy Fitzgerald on Structured Content
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Apr 9, 2023 
Andy Fitzgerald explores why treating the page as the basic unit of content can limit how information travels across websites, apps, and voice interfaces. The conversation ranges from semantic structure and taxonomies to the challenges of making complex medical, civic, and educational information understandable, and why language remains difficult for machines to interpret.
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Pages Are A Limiting Metaphor
- Information architecture must shift from a page-centric web to a web of data as content becomes more interconnected.
- Andy Fitzgerald ties this shift to the field's founders and says pages are a useful metaphor that now hobbles communication.
Humanities Training Shaped His IA Practice
- Andy recounts his humanities background and PhD in English and how it unexpectedly prepared him for information architecture.
- He links studying language and literature to solving client problems about making complex ideas understandable.
Headless CMS Reveals Page Heuristics
- Headless CMS treats content as abstract entities that can be published in many contexts, not tightly bound to a page.
- Andy warns authors still default to page-based heuristics like headings and lists, which hide semantics from machines.