Quintype has been helping news publishers strengthen their online presence with our versatile suite of products for years now. Bold, Accesstype, Metype, Ahead, and Page Builder have proven to help them focus less on tech and more on content as they rightfully should. With all these already available, what is Malibu, and what are we trying to solve with it?
What are we trying to solve?
Sometimes, the constraints of your existing publishing platform will force you to leave to a better alternative. But moving from a publishing platform to another is inevitably expensive and time-consuming, and a big chunk of this exercise usually goes into building a completely custom website. Building a website from the ground up comes with a cost primarily for the time spent on development. On average, we see a publisher takes 8 to 12 months* to go live with their brand new website. What Malibu does is to bring this down to 2 to 6 months*.
How do we do it?
Broadly, there are two aspects of a website
The functionality
The UI
The functionality of news websites usually does not have a stark difference from one another. They all have a homepage, a section page, and a story page. There are ads, and there are logins and subscriptions. But all of that is generic. On the other hand, as soon as you shift your attention to the UI and UX, you'll start noticing huge differences. We realized that extracting out all the basic functionalities and shipping them in a single library reduces the effort on new publishers. As cliche as it sounds, they do not have to reinvent the wheel.
With this in mind, we built a robust, secure, and feature-rich Javascript framework called Malibu. We conceived Malibu out of a need to make content website development quick and trivial. It had to have a host of features that would be useful to every publisher alike. It had to have all the basic functionalities tied into its roots. Some of the features that ships out of the box with Malibu are:
Routing: The app readily understands if a user is visiting your homepage or a story page. The call gets forwarded to the correct handlers that fetch the data and render the page.
SEO best practices: All the structured data defined in schema.org and all required metatags are added to your webpages by default.
PWA support: Users can use your website as a progressive web app for offline reading along with other features supported by PWA.
AJAX navigation: A good user experience goes a long way in retaining your visitors. AJAX navigation helps in reducing user friction by loading necessary content seamlessly without refreshing your page entirely.
As a publisher, what is left for you to do?
As soon as you are on board with Malibu, you have a fully functional, style-free website as the starting point. That's 50% of your work already done, leaving the UI.
Before you dive into creating your UI components, we recommend that you first lock in on a design system. Your brand guidelines, colour palettes, fonts, atomic level UI components, etc., define how your website would look. Having a well thought out design system ensures that the user gets a pleasant reading experience while also making future enhancements and website maintenance hassle-free.
Once all the necessary UI components are ready, the team can wire them into the Malibu framework, and there you have it. Your all-new website on Quintype.
That said, we also have a React UI library called Arrow with tons of UI elements that are fully compatible with Malibu.
*The numbers are based on the complexity, additional features, tech skill of the development team, etc.
To know more about Quintype and how we help publishers, contact [email protected].