LONDON – June 25, 2010 – BaseKit, a platform for creating websites from a Photoshop design without coding, is launching in the US and UK today following a Series A round of VC funding from Eden Ventures and NESTA (the UK’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts). BaseKit, a Seedcamp winner, makes it easy for web professionals to produce and publish websites without writing the HTML code, saving them both time and money.
BaseKit’s technology was developed by web designers who saw a large hole in the market. There is one standard way to design websites – Photoshop, which is used for 90% of small business websites – but no standard for the production and publishing steps of the process. That part of the market is extremely fragmented, with developers trying to write HMTL code themselves or paying an outsourced company to do it for them. BaseKit solved this problem by developing a platform that is easy to use and can quickly turn a website design into a fully functioning site online. Set-up is free and no installation is required. Users can get started on BaseKit with a Free Demo Account or build a full website with unlimited pages for as little as £5 a month or $8. While reducing significantly administration costs, BaseKit also provides ready-to-use features from contact forms to social networking, adding functionality as easy as dragging and dropping.
“Right now it is a complete mess to go from a Photoshop design to a live website,” said Juan Lobato, CEO of BaseKit. “Web designers waste hours coding or spend money hiring someone else to do the job for them. There is no reason to do things this way when you use Basekit and we see it as a huge market opportunity. By streamlining the process, and becoming the missing link between Photoshop and a live site, BaseKit can become the standard way for web professionals to get their creations online.”
Following a successful private beta, BaseKit has more than 20,000 registered users that are excited about what this technology makes possible.
“As a web developer, I was constantly frustrated by how hard it was to take a site from design to production online,” said Stephen Lockhart from Float New Media. “There’s no easy way to do it unless you are a PSD to HTML wiz. With BaseKit I can easily manage every step of the process online. I love that it smoothes the workflow between Photoshop and my live site and takes care of the production and publishing elements that had always been so difficult, costly, and time-consuming. BaseKit is changing the way I do my job”
BaseKit was originally set up by web design entrepreneurs Simon Best, Richard Best, and Richard Healy in 2008 after realizing that the technical design of websites could be improved if processes were streamlined. By reducing iterative development tasks through a common, fully hosted framework, BaseKit is able to create websites faster and make them easier to manage. The company raised an initial round of seed funding in April 2009.
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About BaseKit
Basekit is a smart and fast way to create websites from Photoshop designs without having to code. The company is based in London and was founded in 2008. BaseKit is backed by Eden Ventures, NESTA, and Seedcamp. For more information, please visit www.basekit.com
For more information please contact:
Jamie Walker, Sparkpr for BaseKit (US)
Jamie@sparkpr.com
+1-415-321-1887
Sam Nichols, Sparkpr for BaseKit (UK)
sam@sparkpr.com
+44 (0)791 441 2117
