What’s new with BaseKit
This year, we’ve been working hard behind the scenes to ensure the BaseKit platform experience continues to save time for our users and gives them websites they love.
Our 2024 product roadmap plays a pivotal role in how we continually evolve our software to keep pace with technology and the needs of small businesses. This year the roadmap was shaped by three core themes including:
- Enhancing authenticity with AI
- Design excellence
- Creating confidence with first impressions
Throughout the last 10 months we’ve released new features onto the BaseKit platform every two weeks in line with our roadmap. Here’s a run through the biggest releases this year to date and what’s to come as we close out 2024.
Enhancing authenticity with AI
Based on the most valuable use cases we’ve found for AI within website builders, our first of many AI powered features o come, was released to our e-commerce product, BaseKit Store.
Product descriptions powered by AI
In March we introduced product descriptions powered by AI. BaseKit Store users can effortlessly create unique and personalised product descriptions with a simple AI Writer. Given a few words of text, the AI Writer generates product descriptions that can be customised by tone of voice and text length.
Find out about our new AI Writer
Website text powered by AI
AI text generation has also been released across our BaseKit site builder. Featured in the header and text widgets within the website editor, the AI Writer allows customers to generate powerful and engaging text, also customised by tone of voice and text length.
More about the BaseKit AI Writer
More AI still to come
AI for imagery and template design
We will be using the power of AI to generate imagery to design more impactful templates across a much wider range of business categories than we could previously cover.
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 user 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.
Design Excellence
In line with customer feedback, we’ve continued to find ways to enhance the user journey and evolve our platform capability to suit new website use cases.
In 2024 we also wanted to create something new and unique that would bring design excellence capability into the hands of users with no design experience.
Here’s what we’ve released to date, with more exciting developments yet to come.
A fresh place to start with a new customer dashboard
The new dashboard page offers a fresh starting point upon login with instant access to the products users need most, first.
Introduced in March, to create a more seamless and enhanced customer journey, we have planned future iterations that will add additional features to help drive engagement and increase upsell.
Take a look at our new customer dashboard
New site navigation and service suspension features
At the beginning of the year we added new site navigation options to our website editor allowing users to add a link to an external link, or link to a particular section on any page in the site.
A new service suspension feature was also added to our Bookings application, allowing users to temporarily remove a service from their website and prevent any further bookings without deleting the service. Services can be reinstated at any time and any changes made are updated to the published website instantly.
New bio site section and improved setup to multi-language sites
We’ve also added a new bio site section to make it easy for users to create link pages for use with social media. Social links can be added as icons and links to any URL can be added to the buttons.
We’ve improved the setup to multi-language sites so that the target language now shows on the first screen the user sees, and they are also able to change the default language if they need to in the store.
Improved Store checkout flow
We’ve made improvements to the BaseKit Store checkout flow with a wider range of shipping options to come.
Small business customers can easily select their preferred shipping method, making the checkout process simpler and faster. These enhancements, along with planned updates, will expand our shipping options in future releases.
More about the store checkout flow
What’s still to come with Design Excellence
New and unique to website builders: Precision layout
On the roadmap this year, we’re already developing a ‘precision layout’ feature that will give users much more control over the arrangement of everything on a web page.
Users 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.
Creating confidence with first impressions
We understand the importance of first impressions and we want BaseKit users to feel like they can easily create a website they’ll love that works alongside other existing applications they might be using to run their business, to make life simple.
In 2023, we conducted 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.
As part of our BaseKit connect vision, we also wanted to help our partners to serve packages with more valuable and time efficient software, and a better online experience for their customers.
Here’s what we’ve been up to so far.
Transforming workflows with Zapier
BaseKit users can automate everyday tasks and save time by connecting BaseKit to 5K+ other apps using Zapier.
We believe this to be a highly valuable time saving feature that will transform the workflow experience for Store and Bookings owners and help them to build workflows around our products.
Take a look at the Zapier integration
Site preboarding previews
Users can effortlessly preview a brand new website on both desktop and mobile simultaneously within our onboarding flow.
This feature, which focuses on enhancing user engagement in the crucial initial stages of their product journey, marks the beginning of our revamped onboarding flow.
More about site preboarding previews
The rest of 2024…
For the final months of the year we’re focusing on creating a far more efficient and helpful onboarding flow with less steps and a much wider range of new category template content to choose from.
Attractive custom AI generated imagery will also be shown right at the beginning of the onboarding process, illustrating a wide range of flexible styles to give users confidence they are in the right place to create something special.
These product updates and the rest of our 2024 roadmap are designed to help us achieve our mission to democratise tech around the world, so that many more businesses can thrive online with BaseKit partners.
View all BaseKit product updates.
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