If content is king and user experience is crucial, what can we say about the experiences of people who author content? What makes a good authoring experience, why should I care, and how can I improve my authors’ experience with the CMS? The fundamental purpose of a CMS is to empower us to create and manage Web content. Good user experience should start with the people who are responsible for using this system to work with content. If the process for authoring and editing content in the CMS is cumbersome, authors won’t be actively engaged in maintaining it, and our sites will be woefully out-of-date. Good authoring experience (AX) will make the CMS easier to learn and easier to use, increasing the likelihood that authors will take a more active role in creating content. Active authors do not require excessive post-training support and keep content up-to-date. CMSs should be tailored to their authors, not the other way around. This session will provide experiences and lessons learned as Penn State has iteratively improved our CMS authoring environment to empower its authors.