BaseKit

11th June 2010

If you haven’t noticed – the blog is now redesigned and looking lovely in the new BaseKit colours!

We’ll be back to full speed next week, bringing you all the latest updates from within BaseKit, great articles about design and technology and, of course, some fun stuff we find lurking online.

Until then, enjoy the new look blog!

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17th May 2010

Head of Product Ryan Kiskis tells us about how the development process works at BaseKit Labs…

Here at BaseKit HQ, we’re proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish in helping designers build websites smarter, faster and easier from their PSD files. Our development process is a big part of how we accomplish that with such a small team, and I thought I’d give our customers some insight into how we operate.

Agile – While it’s a popular term in software development, we live and breathe it here. What it means for us is that we do a large number of very short release sprints – usually 3 weeks, sometimes 4 if it’s a big release. Our users will be seeing real, meaningful improvements to BaseKit, month in and month out, as we continue to hone and polish the BaseKit experience. While 3 weeks is a very short time to do releases to customers, we find the only way to get true feedback is to get our software in yours – and then listen carefully to your feedback. That ties in closely to the next point…

Customer Focused – Almost every item on our development roadmap comes directly from customer feedback. We maintain a long term vision for how we’d like to improve BaseKit, with some major new elements coming in the next few months that will serve to change how you think about BaseKit. But those occupy only a small part of our overall roadmap. The majority of what we work on we solicit from you, and it’s important to get that input very quickly and continually as it feeds into our release planning every 3 weeks. So how can you get your feedback into BaseKit? There are actually lots of ways we watch continually:

The feedback tab in the application: This goes straight to our Get Satisfaction team, which our customer experience team reads on a daily basis.

• Visit the forum at www.basekitforum.com: Again, we get continual notices of new activity here and our customer experience team is very active on getting feedback into the larger company from here.
• Email us at support@basekit.com: We ensure we respond to every support or technical request, and endeavour to respond to every feature suggestion. Rest assured that everything here gets directly.
• Surveys: We run user surveys regularly to folks, which we mention to you either in the BaseKit application itself, or by email. Keep an eye out for them – they often have coms great prizes attached!
• Webinars, BaseKit Academy, and Usability Sessions: While we’re based in the UK, our reach to our users is global. Every week we run a number of virtual conference sessions with users across the world, from the UK to Korea. You can find out more on our webinars page at www.basekit.com/webinars.
• Using BaseKit: We have an in-depth system to help discover problems our users run into while using BaseKit, as well as what features, themes and more are popular. So just go ahead and use BaseKit – how you do so can help guide us to improve that experience.

Tiered Releases – So how do we work on this growing list of requests? Every one of those releases includes usually 1-2 major items, which we’ve prioritized over the previous weeks based on volume of requests, importance to the BaseKit experience, greatest reach and impact on our users, and technical complexity. While it’s easy to get wrapped up in the shiny, exciting new things, we ensure that we always reserve part of every sprint for catching up on the little details – customer requests and polish that may only take a few minutes, but make a big difference to the folks who have requested them. This ensures that little things don’t keep getting pushed off and off – it’s those little things that actually might make the most difference to daily users of BaseKit. We also keep part of the release each time for research and testing for major future new developments, and of course our QA team dedicated continually to finding and squashing bugs.

So that’s a little glimpse into how we operate here at BaseKit. The most important thing to take away is – your feedback matters. A lot. So please take the time to send us some!

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10th May 2010

Good afternoon BaseKiteers!

We’ve been busy with some exciting BaseKit improvements. Here is an update:

Requests & Developments

• By heavy request – file uploads! You can upload any file to BaseKit (just like images), and then drag the file onto your site to download.
• Consolidated widget lists – now the widget list expands and contracts around certain classes of widgets – simplifying the list and putting some categories around.
• Form widget improvements – the form widget is now handled in the same place as a normal widgets – drag and drop on, add fields, and you’re on your way.

New Pricing Plans Coming Soon

We’ve been listening to you, and the big feedback is that you’d like to get more BaseKit sites, for less. So, we’re working on a set of new pricing packages. (Please note these are preliminary and subject to change before launch.)

- The current £10 Plus plan will now include the ability to publish up to 3 BaseKit sites to any domain, not just one (only £3.33 per site).

- The Pro plan will allow you to publish up to 5 sites, and will be only £15.

- A new Free plan will let you publish one demo site for free – limited to 3 pages and a basekit domain.

- A new Basic Plan, which lets you publish only one site for £5.

Any plan will let you design and manage unlimited sites, you just won’t be able to publish the more sites beyond your demo site unless you have a subscription.

We’ll keep you informed!

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26th April 2010

Morning BaseKiteers!

All sorts of meetings, holidays and plans being made here at BaseKit, but that doesn’t mean we’ve been slacking!

We’ll have a new release coming out this week – hopefully Wednesday or Thursday- barring anything going wrong –  including theses updates..

• Upload files of any type e.g. pdf, doc, xls, etc. and put them into your site as a widget for users to download
• Instant themes coming soon – fill in a profile (e.g. logo, business name, address, etc.) and it will create a site automagically
• Form widget has been simplified and form tab removed from UI
• Undo and redo problems fixed and it now works for all actions
• Lots more bug & stability fixes

In pretty cool news, we’ve got our hands on an iPad. LOOK!

We’re not just going to be playing games and showing off with it, oh no. Over the next few weeks we hope to get BaseKit working on the iPad. That means you can upload your PSD or use a template, then sit back on your sofa and use the touchpad to edit your site right on the iPad! We’re looking forward to getting this working and trying this out!

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