BaseKit 2024 Product Roadmap
In Spring each year BaseKit unveils our product roadmap for the year ahead.
We have exciting plans for the next 12 months, largely driven by AI, design excellence and customer engagement through improved product onboarding.
With a series of new design features, some powered by the most valuable AI use cases we have found for website builders, we’ll ensure the BaseKit experience continues to save time for your customers and give them websites they love.
Here we share the three core themes shaping our 2024 product roadmap.
Enhancing authenticity with AI
AI for text generation
Based on the most valuable use cases we’ve found for AI within website builders, we’re pleased to say AI is here in the BaseKit Platform with our first feature rolling out to customers now.
As of this week, any customer using BaseKit Store can now effortlessly create unique and personalised product descriptions powered by AI. Given a few words of text, the AI Writer feature will generate product descriptions that can be customised by tone of voice and text length.
Later in the year we will also be adding AI text generation to our website editor, so customers can experiment with eye catching headlines and other thought provoking text using technology to help create a unique voice for their business in double quick time.
AI for imagery and template design
AI is also going to be appearing in our website template design. We will be using AI generated imagery to develop more impactful templates across a much wider range of business categories than we could previously cover, with the ability to create image, illustration and graphic variations. AI will also allow customers to remove backgrounds from certain images if they wish to.
AI to enhance the customer voice
It’s not hard to get AI to assemble a large and complex website template but it’s of little value to the customer if it reflects nothing of what makes them unique.
The customers of small businesses are attracted by the authentic voice of the business and this can be lost entirely with generic AI-generated websites. With all of our BaseKit AI features we will ensure the technology enhances the unique voice of the customer.
Delivering design excellence with more control
This year we’ve been conducting research to understand how customers feel about the design of their website. Design is very subjective so our small business customers will often talk about their experiences and feelings rather than specific features.
We’ve been able to use AI to help us better translate feedback from the many languages our customers speak within the research. Compared to our previous translation technology, AI translation has helped us to better understand more of the nuance in our customer feedback.
The research unveiled that more control over page layout, down to exactly how page elements and content are arranged, was high on the agenda for the customers we interviewed.
Precision layout
On the roadmap this year, we’re already developing a ‘precision layout’ feature that will give customers much more control over the arrangement of everything on a web page with the finest precision.
Customers will be able to arrange, crop, scale and overlap page elements directly on the page. They will also be able to create a different page layout for a mobile website view if they wish to.
Valuable image and font support
To further improve our site design capabilities, we are also adding Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) support, a new image library and a licensed icon collection.
These features support the new precision layout model by making it easier for customers to find and manage collections of images and graphics. AI will be applied to provide image background replacement, especially for creating product shots.
Finally, we will be adding support for variable weight fonts in the website editor. These will give customers precision control over the weight of fonts in headlines and other text blocks to improve the typography quality on their website content.
Creating confidence with first impressions
We’ve done a deep dive into the analytics for our BaseKit onboarding flow to understand more about how we can improve customer engagement in those critical first steps of the product journey.
Our new onboarding flow will have less steps and give customers a much wider range of new category template content to choose from.
We understand the importance of first impressions and we want customers to feel like they can very easily create a website they’ll love as soon as they enter the Platform.
Attractive custom AI generated imagery will be shown right at the beginning of the onboarding process, illustrating a wide range of flexible styles to give customers confidence they are in the right place to create something special.