Content model overview

Your storefront separates content from presentation. The words, images, and page structure live in your authoring source, Document Authoring or the Universal Editor. How that content appears, including a hero banner’s layout, fonts, colors, and sizes, is defined in your storefront’s code. This separation keeps pages fast, consistent, and accessible.

Three roles

Building a page on your storefront involves three roles:

• The Developer owns the storefront’s code, including drop-in customization, new drop-ins, and analytics integrations. See Author and developer tasks for the full breakdown. This role remains unchanged under this content model.
• The Page Designer builds and manages the layout options available to Content Authors, including a block’s styling, spacing, and behavior across devices. This role requires HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills but focuses on layout variations rather than the storefront’s underlying code.
• The Content Author adds text and images, selects pre-built blocks, and assembles pages in Document Authoring or the Universal Editor. Content Authors choose from the layout options that a Page Designer has already built. This role maps to the “author” role described in Author and developer tasks.

Who owns what

The Page Designer owns styling decisions, including font size, color, spacing, and how a block renders across devices. The Content Author focuses on the content itself and chooses the existing layout option that best presents it. See Author and developer tasks for a complete list of tasks that do and don’t require code.

Why layout options are fixed

Every layout option available to a Content Author must first exist in the storefront’s code. For example, each way a hero banner can render must be implemented before a Content Author can select it. If the needed variation doesn’t exist, the Page Designer must build it before it can be used in Document Authoring or the Universal Editor.

Starting from a template

Page Designers create templates for common page types so Content Authors can start from the right baseline instead of an empty page. A Content Author selects the template that most closely matches their needs and builds from there. Product pages already follow this model. See Product Details for how a single template layout powers every product URL.

Reference implementations

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