---
meta-title: EMBL-EBI Style Lab
title: EMBL-EBI Core Content Specification
cta: Distilling the purpose of your content ecosystem and tracking its effectiveness.
filter-nav: false
filter-dropdowns: false
pagetype: meta-pattern
layout: static
location: /general/core-content-spec
---
{{#markdown}}
Cause and effect. We write text and create page layotus to make things happen: download a PDF, submit data or to get the use to think of EMBL-EBI as great place.
### Why
The Core Content Specification is a method we utilise to:
1. Make a statement of what we seek to achieve
2. Document the thinking and actors involved
3. Track success
### When
Use this method on a series of web pages or ecosystem. This is primairly web-focused, but the methods can be adapted to print documents.
For example a service might have a few Core Content Specifications:
1. The homepage
- A top layer model about how a user engages into the rest of the site.
2. An application side
- How users submit a query, view results, download data, etc.
3. An "About" section
- How users learn about the service, view news, engage with social media.
### How
The tool we use to make our Core Content Specificacations is currently a document template (more on that below) that asks about our goals from different — but interconected — angles:
- Mission
- URLs
- Goals
- Target audience
- Content
- Inward and outward paths
### Getting started
#### 1. Help and guidance
This is a fairly new and evolving process. We'd love to hear how you've utlised it, and we're happy to help you get started: [khawkins@ebi.ac.uk](mailto:khawkins@ebi.ac.uk)
#### 2. Use the template
You can use the below Google Doc as template and documentation for your Core Content Specifications.
Open the document below in Google Docs
### Our future plans?
Working with the Web Content Committee, Communications, Training, Web Development and other teams, this model has been evolving since the end of 2016. Here is what we have planned for the next evolution:
1. Visualise the data we've collected.
- Core Content Specifications share connections between models. We can use those connections to see a bird's eye view of pathways between models and see which ecosystems are performing as expected.
2. Performance measurement
- By looking at the documented content and associated goals, we can use tools like Google Analytics to measure more than time on page, and begin to measure real success.
3. A real database tool
- Many parts of the Google Doc are a relational database and as such are a poor fit to be done by hand. We could build a better system on the web, once the model has fully stabilised (we should be nearly stable).
{{/markdown}}