How long does it take to get your messaging in front of your audience?
This question is central to the agility and efficiency of your marketing operations, but is often neglected in favour of more abstract ideas around what type of content is being produced.
Fortunately, this issue of publication efficiency has an easy answer, and it all comes down to your author experience (AX).
What is an Author Experience?
Put simply, the AX is the authoring flow inside your CMS.
An effective AX means clearer fields, dependable previews, and a review path that fits how your team actually works. In other words, the ease with which content writers can upload, publish, and edit their work.
A good AX also expands the range of content which your team can produce and publish. Rather than forcing every piece of messaging through the same rigid templates, you can mix and match modules and components to build blogs, case studies and reports that directly match the information you need to communicate.
The main determinant of AX quality is the configuration of your content management system (CMS). By selecting the right CMS for your content needs, and configuring it correctly, a backend development team can make a dramatic difference to your publishing workflow.
At Kooba, we generally recommend Craft CMS or ExpressionEngine as CMS options, but we frequently work with other solutions.
What the data says about time saved
The impact of improving AX can be directly measured. Forrester’s Total Economic Impact study on modern CMS adoption found organisations reduced time to publish by 90% and cut content-related development time by 80%. Meanwhile, automating image and video preparation can save hours of work for content teams, whilst also improving consistency and performance.
Usability research reinforces these findings. Nielsen Norman Group highlights that structured content standards and reusable blocks reduce decision fatigue, speed up production, and limit errors. Together, this evidence shows that author-centred design is not (just) cosmetic, but directly increases velocity and reduces waste.
In other words, you’ll work faster and make less mistakes with an improved AX.
Five AX upgrades that immediately save time
Task oriented content models
Replace generic rich text with structured fields that mirror real author tasks such as teaser, body, media, related links, and SEO. This reduces recall and speeds decisions, with structured, reusable content blocks improving efficiency and consistency.
Reusable blocks with guardrails
Provide a curated set of page sections such as hero, stats, testimonial, and call to action, with defaults and usage notes. This enables fast assembly while keeping quality high. These shared standards also create a single source of truth and reduce debate during creation.
Guided workflows and roles
Configure clear states like drafting, in review, approved, and scheduled. ExpressionEngine, for instance, supports custom statuses and role based access so authors, editors, and publishers see only what matters, which shortens review queues without leaving the CMS.
Reliable preview and staging
Use contextual previews that match templates and breakpoints so reviewers see the real thing once. With the right CMS, you can add draft previews and secret share links to keep reviews within one workflow.
Automation for the boring parts
Automate image variants, alt text prompts, link checking, redirects on URL changes, and metadata templates. Media automation leads directly to time savings, but also ensures consistency across your website’s imagery and assets, and prevents information from slipping out of date.
Post-publication measurement
Of course, the AX doesn’t end when the content goes live. A modern authoring environment should also integrate analytics to give writers and marketers clear feedback on how each piece performs, from engagement rates to SEO visibility. This closes the loop between creation and outcome, helping teams understand what works, retire content that doesn’t, and adjust messaging faster. In this way, AX not only streamlines production but enables a continuous system of learning and improvement, ensuring that every new content piece is shaped by real audience data.
To start improving your AX, saving time, and generating more valuable insights into your content performance, just get in touch with Kooba’s team today.
