BaseKit

8th July 2010

In the first of a regular series, we’ll be looking at our most valuable asset – our user base! We see some great sites being built on BaseKit every day, and we think they should be shown off to as many people as possible. As well as that, there are some great stories behind the sites. So, without further ado, please meet our first profile-ee – Edwin Orellana, who built the excellent http://www.educrear.com/ on BaseKit

Hi Edwin, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Well, my name is Edwin Orellana, I am from Guatemala, Central America. I lived and studied in South Africa for 4 years.

Until about one month ago I was an ESL and technology teacher. I had been doing this for more than 10 years, now, I’ve ventured into the freelancer world. I learned about computers when I was 17 years old, it didn’t interest me before that, a friend of mine told me that there was a community course in my town (Chiquimula) for less than a dollar a month, so I went. I only took one month though, and I made friends with the teacher who let me come and go whenever i wanted. So I began my self-learning journey and from then on it’s history. I have been using photoshop for about 2 years now and I love it, it was about the same time I got involved in web designing and development. I like to code and design, but sometimes the process between designing and coding is a long stretch.

How did you hear about BaseKit?

I heard about BaseKit on one of the many blogs I read. What caught my attention was the idea of less coding and more design. I signed up for the beta account. It was really easy to get started with it. The interface is very user friendly and even though I had never done any photoshop slicing, the video tutorials guided me through the whole process. The rest is very intuitive.

Have you used any other web building tools? How does BaseKit compare?

I had seen other tools similar to BaseKit, even some photoshop plugins, but some of them were too complicated to use, and other very simple. I guess if the time used in learning how to use a tool is the same as the time used to learn how to code it is the same then it’s not worth it. Now, with BaseKit it was a different story, BaseKit was the easiest and most useful tool,I ever used, It practically did everything for me, fast, and very easy to learn.

What is your favourite thing about BaseKit?

My favorite thing about BaseKit is not only its usability, but also its community. There’s competitions, tweets, blogs, etc. Another thing I love about BaseKit is that it’s growing so fast, and it keeps getting better and better every time. I think its all about team work. The support is amazing, they’re very friendly and really want to help you.

Right now I’m working on a site for “crear” (http://www.educrear.com). It’s an education consulting group that gives workshops. Its previous site was a disaster, so I offered them my services as a freelancer, and I thought BaseKit was the perfect choice, so i went about working on it. I focused mainly on the photoshop design, because I knew that with BaseKit, the work would be a lot faster and cleaner. The result was great, they loved the site, and any change they needed to be done, I could do it in less than a day. It was all about the design. Sometimes they would simply call me and tell me that they wanted the logo a little to the left, and without hanging up, I would just shift it with the mouse and publish. It was all done so fast that I decided to go freelance. It was something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, and I guess that BaseKit one important factor in my decision, its fast, reliable and I can put up a site in less than a day.

What would you like to see next in BaseKit?

I can’t wait to see more widgets on BaseKit, and even widget creation options. I would also like to see a blog option for BaseKit as well as user login options. To sum it up, I think BaseKit is great, it’s a great tool that is improving more and more everyday.