Kate Thomas
Kate Thomas is leading the transformation of marketing content at PayPal from hand-crafted web pages to structured content stored in a headless CMS.
Like many organizational-transformation projects, this one has highlighted both the benefits of structuring content and the challenges of getting content authors to work in new ways.
We talked about:
the migration of the PayPal marketing content from hand-crafted web pages to structured content managed in a headless CMS
her prior work at PayPal modeling their legal content
how they structured their content and ascribed meaning to it with metadata
the main benefits of structuring content, foremost among them speed to market, the ability to scale, and to more efficient content localization
her first foray into structured content when she worked on a developer portal
how the governance issues she dealt with in content roles in higher education and government, as well as the governance processes she saw in agency roles, led to her interest in structured content
the operational transition from hand-building pages to the new structured-content operation and governance framework
the importance of the authoring experience in a new system like this
the role of content modeling in her work to structure the content
how their new structured-content model let them create new pages about business practices in Ukraine in just a few days
Kate's bio
Kate Thomas is a content architect at PayPal. She has led content teams in Australia, the UK and the US, delivering workable, scalable content solutions for government, universities and global brands over a 20+ year career slaying the content dragon.
Connect with Kate online
LinkedIn
PayPal jobs page (work with Kate!)
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUd8s4b-zgU
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 117. The benefits of structured content are now well known: improved consistency, the ability to scale, quicker content delivery, more governable content operations, efficient localization of content for other countries and cultures. But even the most progressive and successful companies are still working to fully adopt this important content practice. In this interview, Kate Thomas shares insights that she has gleaned as they've structured the marketing content at PayPal.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 117 of the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I am really happy today to have with us, Kate Thomas. Kate is a content architect at PayPal, and she's working on some really interesting structured content and CMS work there. So welcome, Kate. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days.
Kate:
Hi, Larry. Thanks for having me. Yes, at PayPal we've been working for the past couple of years on moving all the marketing content on paypal.com from hand coded, handcrafted pages into a structured content framework delivered in a headless CMS.
Larry:
Nice. And so have you been involved from the very start with that? Is it kind of your baby, this project, or?
Kate:
Kind of my baby in the sense that I was asked to work on it and I thought, well, that's now my baby. It's someone else bigger baby, but I'm the midwife, I suppose, of the content model in a way. So we had new management come in and head up paypal.com. When you look at paypal.com, there's lots of things going on. So when I'm talking about it, all I'm talking about is the marketing content. So on paypal.com you can also get help content, you can get legal content and there's a whole lot of campaign pages that you know exist but they're sort of outside of the core marketing pages. So the first thing is to qualify we're talking about the core content that we deliver in marketing.
Kate:
And management change, sort of the person in charge of .
