Every post sits in exactly one stage. It moves forward with one clear button — the user never touches a status dropdown. Backward moves are always confirmed, never silent.
The current Blog Automation page is a power-user dashboard: stacked filter rows, six action buttons, and a dense data table. For the target customer — realtors, dentists, plumbers, people who don't do marketing for a living — this is intimidating and unclear. Users shouldn't need to understand "statuses" and "filters" just to publish a blog post.
Replace the table-first landing page with a card-based home screen built around a simple pipeline: Create → Draft → Review → Schedule → Post. Every blog post lives in exactly one stage at a time, and each stage is a card on the home screen. Posts move forward through a single clear button at the bottom of each screen. The user never touches a status dropdown.
| Card | What it holds | Count example |
|---|---|---|
| Create New Blog | Entry point for all creation methods | — |
| My Drafts | Posts being written or edited | "11 in progress" |
| In Review | Posts being previewed before approval | "6 waiting on you" |
| Scheduled | Approved posts queued for a future date | "21 posts queued" |
| Published | Live posts | "4 live" |
| Card | Function |
|---|---|
| YouTube to Blog | Turn a video into a post (existing feature) |
| Article to Blog | Reframe an existing link (existing "Reframe a Link") |
| Create My Own | Write from scratch |
| 60-Day Plan | Generate a full content schedule (existing, relocated) |
| Import CSV | Bulk-import posts (existing, relocated) |
All creation methods land the new post in My Drafts and open the Edit screen.
The existing editor — title, body, category, SEO, featured image. Bottom button: Looks good, let's review it moves the post to In Review and opens the Review screen. Posts can also be closed and left in My Drafts to finish later.
A true preview: the post rendered exactly as it will appear on the live website — featured image, formatting, the works. Not the edit screen with toolbars hidden. This is the whole value of the step: "this is what your readers will see." Bottom buttons: Needs more work returns the user directly to the Edit screen for this specific post (not just the drafts list) and moves it back to My Drafts; Looks great opens the Schedule or Post Now screen.
Post now publishes immediately and moves the post to Published. Schedule ahead lets the user pick a date/time and moves it to Scheduled. Scheduled posts publish automatically on their date and move to Published.
Clicking any post in the Scheduled card reopens it in the Review screen with three context-aware buttons:
The payoff: users only ever learn one screen for "look at my post and decide what happens to it."
A chat widget pinned to the bottom of every page that answers "how do I use this?" — grounded in Content Studio's own help documentation, not general questions. It's context-aware: the bot knows which page the user is on, so "what do I do here?" from the Review screen gets a Review-specific answer. At minimum it should cover the five-card pipeline, each creation method, scheduling/rescheduling, and where relocated features now live (CSV import, 60-Day Plan, WordPress sync).
Note: this is a new capability, not a Blog cleanup — it spans the whole app. Tracked separately on the redesign map as a cross-cutting item pending an Erick build-vs-embed decision. The help content itself still needs to be written; this spec is a starting point.
Card-based pipeline concept, stage names, button copy ("Looks good, let's review it" / "Needs more work" / "Looks great"), the scheduled-post-reopens-in-Review behavior, and the help-chatbot requirement — all from live use of the platform, July 2026.