2024 Product wrap-up
A Year of Innovation and Growth
As we close out another year, we’re excited to share the strides we’ve made in evolving the BaseKit platform throughout 2024. Our commitment to empowering small businesses and enhancing the user experience has driven a series of impactful updates.
As always, in March, we attended CloudFest to unveil our 2024 product roadmap to our partners. The roadmap focused on three themes: enhancing AI authenticity, achieving design excellence, and creating confidence through first impressions.
The feedback was very positive, especially regarding our new AI-generated content and design excellence features, which planned to significantly enhance our website builder’s capabilities.
Here’s a wrap of how the BaseKit Platform has evolved throughout 2024.
Enhancing Authenticity with AI
In early 2024 we introduced AI to enhance our platform’s capabilities to save time for users, while maintaining their unique voice.
The AI Writer was released to BaseKit Store, improving how users could quickly generate engaging and personalised product descriptions customised by tone of voice and text length.
This feature was then quickly rolled out across the full BaseKit Platform so that any text could be generated by AI across the website builder, again with customisation by text length and tone of voice.
Design Excellence
In 2024 we’ve introduced several features to enhance design flexibility and efficiency, allowing BaseKit users to create visually stunning and professional websites.
The new customer dashboard, launched in March, gives customers a fresh starting point when they login to BaseKit. It simplifies the customer journey by directing them to the products they need most, first, with a more seamless and helpful experience.
One of our most exciting releases this year is the integration with Zapier, which allows BaseKit users to connect their websites to over 5,000 other applications they may be using to run their business. This feature has transformed the workflows of Store and Bookings users, enabling them to automate tasks and save valuable time.
For BaseKit Site, we have improved site navigation options and improved the setup process for multi-language sites. Navigation enhancements in the site editor now enable users to add external links or links to specific sections within their site. Customers can also create link pages for social media, with the ability to add any urls as icons or buttons.
We’ve also simplified the setup process to improve the user experience for multi-language websites. The first screen now shows the target language, enabling customers to change their default language quickly.
Our Bookings application now includes a service suspension feature that lets customers temporarily remove a service from their website without deleting it. Suspended services remain visible and can be reinstated, with changes instantly reflected on the published website.
BaseKit Store has seen significant improvements to its checkout process. The enhancements to the Store checkout flow now allow customers to easily select their preferred shipping method, to streamline their purchasing experience.
These updates to our payment flow will enable us to offer a broader range of shipping options in future releases. Additionally, we now display product weight, providing customers with essential information that helps them better understand product quantity and shipping choices. Furthermore, BaseKit Store allows small business customers to enter their Tax ID or VAT number during checkout.
Creating confidence with first impressions
We understand how important first impressions are and want customers to feel they can easily create a website they’ll love as soon as they enter the BaseKit platform.
The first enhancement to the BaseKit Site onboarding process now enables customers to create a new website and preview it simultaneously on both desktop and mobile.
We’ve also released trending website content templates during the onboarding process so that the most popular categories show beneath the template search box with simple buttons to select a template of choice.
Future iterations of the onboarding flow will give customers fewer steps in the onboarding process to help drive engagement.
Looking forward
Over the next few months we’ll be finalising our 2025 product roadmap due for release in March next year. Entirely new themes will come into play, as always, informed by partner and customer feedback and significant product research.
Product VP Gordon Plant said, “In 2025, we’ll be building on the foundations we’ve established this year. While you’ll see new AI capabilities integrated throughout the product, our focus remains steadfast: empowering our customers to excel at what they do best, rather than replacing their expertise with AI-generated content.”
Ahead of the new roadmap, early next year we’ll be releasing the final elements of our 2024 roadmap including our new site onboarding flow, on which we have made significant progress this year. We’ll also be releasing the ability for users to set unique discount pricing for individual products in BaseKit Store.
We’re also excited to be in the final stages of creating a new customer login to BaseKit Store – giving store visitors the option to create their own account on the users’ website, prompted before and during their product purchase process. The account will give customers the ability to set a default delivery address for current and future orders.
This will be accompanied by our ‘precision layout’ feature, allowing customers to arrange, crop, scale, and overlap page elements directly and create a mobile-specific layout.
As always next year we will also be further improving the security of the BaseKit platform by integrating a web application firewall in addition to the existing firewall.
Stay tuned for more exciting updates in early 2025, and watch this space for our 2025 product roadmap, in March.
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