A response to Not All Content is Created Equal (February 2024)
In February 2024, in the middle of my pricing series, I made a point that I think a lot of people miss when they budget a website. The number of pages matters less than what is on them:
“Far more relevant is a website’s content density and complexity.”
A short blog post with an image or two is one thing. A credit union page full of rate tables, a product page with tabs of specifications and FAQ accordions, a scholarly article with anchored footnotes and tooltips: those are something else entirely. I meant every word of that, and most of it is still true.
Why complexity used to cost so much
In 2024, dense content was expensive for two reasons. The first was the thinking: someone had to work out how all that material should be structured. The second was the building: every special layout, every table style, every footnote system meant development time, or a stack of plugins to approximate it.
The second reason is where the agentic revolution comes in. AI agents now write and revise custom code under experienced direction. A footnote system that works the way a scholar actually wants, a rate table that reads well on a phone, a product layout with exactly the right tabs: these can be built for the specific content, quickly, without bolting on a plugin for each one. And migrating hundreds of pages of complex material from an old site, restructuring it along the way, is exactly the kind of patient, repetitive work agents handle well.
So a site that is heavy on complex content no longer has to carry a development bill that grows with every special layout.
The part that is still real work
Here’s where I want to be careful, because the most important point in that video hasn’t changed at all. I warned that a redesign with less content isn’t necessarily a cheaper redesign:
“Working through all the old content, in order to determine how to condense and consolidate is an extensive content design task.”
That is still true. Agents can move content, reformat it, and even propose a structure for it. They can’t decide what an organization should stop saying. Someone has to read the old material, understand the audience, decide what to keep, what to rewrite, what to merge, and what to let go. That’s judgment, and it belongs to people who know the client and know the visitors.
If anything, the balance of a budget has shifted toward that work. When building gets cheaper, more of the money goes to the planning and content decisions that actually make a site useful. I think that’s the right place for it.
Content types still need a plan
My practical advice was to break complex sites down by content type:
“Identify a few of primary content types, such blog posts, product or service pages, or technical detail pages and set some expectations on the density and complexity of each type.”
I’d give exactly the same advice today. Inventory the existing content. Group it into types. Decide what each type needs to do. That’s information design, and it’s the foundation the build sits on.
What changes is what happens next. In 2024, each content type meant mapping it onto whatever a page builder or a plugin could support, and accepting the gaps. Now each type can get a structure designed for it, built in clean code, and still edited easily. Editors can work right on the page with Simply Edit, or in WordPress as they always have.
Still not created equal
Content is still not created equal. Some of it is simple and some of it is hard, and the hard stuff still deserves careful scoping and honest pricing. The difference is that the hard part is now mostly the thinking, not the coding. We no longer have to compromise on how complex content is presented just because building the right presentation costs too much.
Ask the questions. Do the inventory. Then build exactly what the content needs.
¡Viva la Revolución!