PS As for Blist, I’ve actually been ecstatically happy with http://www.dabbledb.com …

You definitely need to salary a CEO with no hands-on IT experience a few hundred k, plus a sign on bonus. The CEO will need a secretary. Then a marketing firm should be retained. Project managers, accountants, employee benefit specialists are required. Oh yes, and you need programmers that are required to report to the Sales and Marketing VP.

And yes, I am being facetious.

Some examples sites built entirely with Kommonwealth (no templates used)
http://kommonwealth.com/pjclawgroup
http://kommonwealth.com/tlc
http://kommonwealth.com/wildernessalert
http://kommonwealth.com/maplebear

And my blog -> http://kommonwealth.com/tb

Some features
- Drag n drop page elements.
- wysiwyg text editing
- Multiple sites - intuitive namespacing
- Auto generated nav bars
- Auto centering of page elements
- 65+ font graphical image generator
- SEO mgmt.
- Advanced widgets, including myDB, project mgmt, RSS, Carousels, image galleries, mashups etc.
- Multiple file uploads / Image mgmt.
- Tons of widgets, including some beta social networking

The best part about this product is that I don’t spend any time messing with code, so I have more time to write my stories.

What we see (and others don’t) is that there is no TOP OF MIND product in this market. No one continually recommends a CMS to their friends. Without Techcrunch, how many of us would even know what products exist?

Before one criticizes, wait until you need a Website, and then evaluate all these products the way a buying consumer would. We don’t live off page uniques—we live off long-term relationships with individual customers.

Going to a hosted on-demand solution for their website is a smart choice. We’ve have been doing it for the last 2 years at UGAL (http://www.ugal.com) and we will still be doing it next year I am not worried about that.

(Just a satisfied customer)

i need a website for my computer so i can do the business on internet. you know where? man in india say only 300 dollars for big website. i want sell product. please help.

all the major domain registrars offers website creation tools already, and it’s free on 1and1.com - with a wide variety of templates/features

*flush*

where will they be working next year?

FLIMP (www.flimp.net) is one alternative that lets companies create, distribute and track rich media microsites that can support video and flash. This all-in-one platform lets designers and marketers create interactive sites in an easy-to-use WYSIWYG with professional designer features that enable images and content to fully align. The FLIMP platform offers a number of easy-to-use distribution options ranging from email distribution to integration into existing websites or integration into web ads. Finally, FLIMPs offers actionable reporting data presented in an easy-to-understand format.

The big players in CMS are Red Dot, Open Text, Ektron, Hannon Hill. Their products are not at all cheap, or really that easy to use. But the features these giants have are what people REALLY need when they’re serious about maintaining Web site—no matter what the size of the site:

- Version control of content
- Multiple Users with permission levels
- Sophisticated Navigation Control
- Sophisticated Customization of Templates
- Interfaces that can support managing Web sites with hundreds of pages
- Control of Javascript and CSS

These features are not available in a cheap CMS solution that regular people can use. I think what my team (and Doodlekit) are trying to do is bring some of the features of these big boys to the masses. Furthermore—these are the features the enablers (designers and developers) need to build sites.

Software-as-Service CMS is an emerging new market. It’s a market the big CMS vendors have been scoffing at because the products we create will make their $25,000 price tags seem ridiculous. I think the dummy-proof products like Weebly and Sampa make it hard for REAL (I said it) CMS systems to get attention when we’re trying to kill a billion-dollar industry.

My opinion is while Weebly and Sampa may attract some business users, those users will eventually move away when they want to gain more control of their sites—business customers are the ones who pay. If you run a small law firm and need a good Web site up and running, you’ll gladly pay $50 a month to control every aspect of your Web site—top to bottom.

Nick: The WYSIWYG aspect of Doodlekit may not be obvious until you download and install an HTML editor plugin.

Drag and drop sites like Weebly are good, but as a professional designer and developer, I get frustrated wondering why I cannot easily align an image next to text. I have client sites to build. Why do I have to stack all my page elements on top of each other? Where do I edit the CMS? Where do I import my own template? How many small businesses really want to have a generic template for their Web site? How can you get the blog look and feel you really want without working with a designer?

I don’t think this market has matured. There is no ‘top-of-mind’ product for building a small business Web site (or sites in general). So many people want to squeeze the design and development out of a Web site. And in reality, many people don’t realize the designers and developers are the ones making the technology recommendations for small (and really small) businesses. There’s a market there and we want to tap into it—rapidly converting static small business sites into sites people can edit on their own.

And what I like about one of my own competitors—Doodlekit—is they are creeping in features that larger CMS systems have—ones that small businesses can never afford. Web 2.0 (ugh) is starting to bring enterprise CMS tools to the masses.

@lateefx - ???