Template Schema Freeze (Onboarding)

Template Schema Freeze (Onboarding)

1. 01

   Inventory the client's structured data before writing a single page template

   List every field the client can supply at scale: SKU, price, square footage, service radius, review count, inventory status. A template is only as defensible as the fields behind it.

2. 02

   Score each field on uniqueness and refresh cadence

   A price that changes weekly beats a boilerplate paragraph that never changes. Fields that are identical across 400 pages are the ones that trigger thin-content classification.

3. 03

   Define the minimum viable field set that no competitor can copy

   For a multi-location client, that might be local pricing plus technician availability. For a catalog client, it is stock status plus spec tables. Write the set down and treat it as a gate.

4. 04

   Draft the page skeleton with fixed slots for each dynamic field

   Lock the H1 pattern, the first 100 words, the data table position, and the internal link block. Answer engines pull from the opening paragraph, so that slot cannot be a variable.

5. 05

   Run a duplicate-risk pass across 20 sample pages before scaling

   Generate 20 pages from the template and compare them pairwise. If two pages share more than roughly 70 percent of their body text, the template is not ready for 500 URLs.

6. 06

   Set the publish ceiling and the review interval in the client scope document

   Agree on a monthly page cap and a quarterly data-refresh obligation. Both belong in the retainer language so the client owns the data feed that keeps pages distinct.

7. 07

   Confirm CMS field mapping and rollback path with the delivery engineer

   Whether the stack is WordPress, Webflow, or Shopify, verify that a bad batch can be unpublished in one operation rather than page by page.