Marqui is a Content Management System that has paid me along with a number of webloggers to take a hard look at their product and tell them what we think. They have told us write and say as we wish.
Being I am not a graphic artist I wanted to see how difficult it would be to alter the page styles from within the Marqui Administrative Interface from a developers perspective.
Having only built some generic HTML pages in the past with nothing overly fancy going on under the hood but plain Jane HTML. I asked a friend of mine who is a web developer, his opinion on the complexity and level of expertise that a company would have to retain to build a initial layout with the Marqui CMS tools.
He and I spent about a hour in the web tools function and pulled out the source html and he dug through it for quite awhile. His analysis was that you would definitely need to have a professional do the initial design of the pages. But I had already assumed that as most companies either out-source or if they are big enough have someone on staff.
He came up with a rough estimate on the investment a company would have to outlay initially to get a full functional Marqui CMS up and running. He indicated the effort would probably run around three thousand dollars. He did say that once it was built then updating and adding minor features would not be a big deal.
Being the header of most sites do not change often my eyes are always drawn to the margins, as this is the area in which most changes happen on companies websites. From my perspective on a scale of 1-10 and 10 being the hardest. I rated the changing of rotating content in the margins at about a 4.
But even I have to admit that once the core of the site is built adding and changing content to the main site would be extremely easy.
One of the features that I explored later, was the way the Marqui Content Management System would handle a company news event. Many times companies will want to send a press-release along with an e-mail to their customers and update the website. With pre-built templates publishing a single news event happens simultaneously with the push of the approval button.
Thus far my experience with Marqui is that the users must love working with the tool. But I think having good website developers would also be a requirement. I am not sure how big a company needs to be to have a permanent staffed web designer but at the very least companies that use Marqui should hire competent web designers.
I think also their is a nitch market for someone looking to make some real money. In my conversation with the CEO Stephen King he indicated sales were up. This tells me that Marqui is going to be looking to connect companies with developers and if a developer proves his or her salt they will have enough business to pay the bills and then some for a long time.
If you are a web developer looking for more clients you need to send me a e-mail geek@geeknewscentral.com and I will put you in direct contact with people that count at [Marqui].