Opinion: Why Websites Should Be Built Around Information Models, Not Pages

A developer essay published on DEV Community argues that the standard approach to building websites — starting with a sitemap and pages — is fundamentally backwards. The author contends that pages are merely representations of underlying entities such as products, people, and services, not the canonical objects themselves. As AI retrieval systems, search engines, and autonomous agents increasingly need to interpret web content, repeatedly reconstructing meaning from page-based structures becomes inefficient. The piece proposes an approach called Information-First Web Architecture (IFWA), which advocates defining an organisation's information model before deciding how it should be presented. IFWA is described not as a new protocol or framework, but as a design principle for determining what should be treated as canonical prior to any interface decisions.