We recently ran a competition at BaseKit - it was fairly simple - design a site using BaseKit and the best looking one wins a prize. If you missed it, we’re sorry, but it was a closed competition, and there were only ten places. (look out for another design competition in the future though!

The results were amazing - penguins, lifts, flood warnings, music watches and more! It shows how great designers can put BaseKit to work in a variety of different ways. You can see the fruits of their labours here.

By the way - worldmusic.basekit.com won the prize!

While we are on the subject of competitions it’s worth checking out the BaseKit Twitter account - we are running a few competitions and giveaways there too - if you’re feeling lucky you could bag an early Christmas present!

Thanks to the wonderful people at NESTA we at BaseKit were able to attend the ‘Social Media - A Force For Good’ talk as part of the ‘Silicon Valley Comes to the UK’ series of events. The talk and general discussion was from Biz Stone - one of the founders of Twitter, Reid Hoffman, social networking trendsetter and LinkedIn supremo and the UK’s foremost Twitterer - Mr Stephen Fry.

The talk itself veered wildly from the idea as social networking as a force for good, and in to the general area of what social networking means for individuals and organisations, the future of social and a discussion of the recent events that social networking has had an impact on. Insightful and entertaining it was a great event. Rather than give you all a blow by blow recap we suggest that you have a look at the video here.

We would also like to point at that from our vantage point we noticed that Stephen Fry was wearing socks that looked like shoes with laces up the front….

It’s a historic day at BaseKit HQ as we begin the first phase of our marketing assault. We know that the Internet is a vast space and we cannot reach our potential users through simple word of mouth - electronic or otherwise.

To that end we have launched our first advertising campaign by announcing the death of PSD slicing. Because, well, that’s what BaseKit does - it eliminates the need to slice up Photoshop designs into code. PSD to site without the pesky plaintext middleman. The above advert is running on the very excellent web design and development blog Smashing Magazine - a wonderful hub of potential BaseKitters.

We’re looking forward to seeing Smashing Mag’s readers take on BaseKit - we hope they find it as useful as we think it can be, and fully expect a flood of feedback. (We are in beta - we LIVE on feedback!)

Like we’ve said before, BaseKit is simple to use. But even the most simple of tools need some guidance before they can be used effectively and to their full potential.

This is why every Friday afternoon our useabilty expert - Mr Gordon Plant -  hosts a live Webinar demonstrating BaseKit’s functionality and answering your questions. Usually this will take the form of Gordon showing you how to build a site from a Photoshop document and then explaining one of the features in more depth, like editing the CSS or how to use layer effects…

We can even send you the files used in the demo so you can put the site together yourself, and of course Gordon will answer any questions you may have. You can also suggest features you want to see in future directly to people on the BaseKit team.

We use Webex to deliver the Webinar, so all you’ll need is an internet connection. Of course it’ll be much better if you’ve got a mic and a webcam, but it’s up to you!

So, if you’re interested in finding out how to get the most out of BaseKit mail us at beta@basekit.com and join in!

We try to keep things simple at BaseKit - we believe that the BaseKit site builder tool is simple enough to be explained in less than two minutes. So we made this video.

BaseKit from BaseKit Team on Vimeo.

OK, only just less than two minutes, but still!

We think it covers the main points about what BaseKit can do, but there’s plenty more in depth tutorials and demonstrations to be found on our Vimeo page. They are well worth checking out if you have a passing interest in our site builder or are stuck into the beta and need to figure out how to do something.

We hope to expand our video collection in the near future with more specific tutorials and spotlights on our features.

If you’re interested in BaseKit - why not sign up to our beta and stay in touch by following us on Twitter

BaseKit’s recent Seedcamp adventures have brought us to Silicon Valley through mid November. Finally recovered, we are happy to report that it was a rip roaring success!

Our first time in the Valley was always going to be a good experience but with all the events that Seedcamp had organized for us, it was the ultimate trip. Visiting Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo we were able to interact with the best of the best.

Our first trip was to the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Submit where we hung out (or in other words, too tight to by a ticket!), speaking to advisers and mentors as they passed through. We met up with Ben Godfrey, a San Fran Veteran (well, he’s been there more times than we have) who showed us the sites. Great to get in the mix of it so quickly and experience the networking possibility of being at such an event and being in the Web Tech hub of the world.

Next was visiting Google at their HQ which is beyond belief! Free food and a great working environment. Great to see the more relaxed way of building a Super Business; Employ the best people and give them a inspiring place to work! Google took us through their current offerings; Android, OpenSocial and GWT. Even though it was great to hear about all these technologies, the most relevant chat was with a Lead Product Manager at Youtube. Google have an interesting feedback loop; they release the product into the Google ecosystem first and get feedback. I think this truely awesome! Like a incubation stage before they release products into the wild.

Next was a great talk with Twitter. This was really the most interesting and relevant chat. The problems Twitter have had are well reported but ultimately, they have product that people want. There were some great questions asked; mine was about how did they get people (and investors) to believe in such a crazy idea (it is crazy… I don’t care what you say!). I didn’t realize (I should do my homework!) the guy behind Twitter was also behind Blogger (sold to Google) which obviously gave them the validation. Twitter started out as a side project and once it started gaining traction they jumped on it full time. The combination of Founder experience and the user traction got them the investment they needed. Very interesting!

Separately, we went to Palo Alto to visit Facebook in one of their many buildings (8 apparently!), we talked about the Facebook experience and Connect (which is awesome by the way – really looking forward to connecting this up into BaseKit). More free food and great company! I love how Facebook is built in PHP… so many haters but it is a great testimony to my favorite language (joint 1st with javascript).

So the weekend descended on us so we got busy building our presentations for Seedcamp in the Valley. Our pitch went great at Microsoft and at SocialMedia, we kept it short and snappy showing for some of the developments we’ve made in the past 2 months since Seedcamp (still a bit hush hush – sorry!).

Our next visit was to Techcrunch then Yahoo! The TC Ranch was not what I expecting… no horses or cowboys (generalization? probably!) but inside (even though it was very early) there was a lingering buzz of the start of another day of hot-off-the-press journalism. We met the team who ran Crunchbase and the Techcrunch core products. As Heather Harde was speaking, I sensed a presence behind us. Peering over my left shoulder, there stood the Man Giant himself, Mike Arrington! He gave us advice on how to deal with blogs and getting PR coverage, but kept it brief because he knew that we were there to pitch to him. Great guy! Great advice! Some of the Seedcamp teams got some great coverage.

After finally finding Yahoo! (by that I mean, turning up to the correct building!) we received some awesome information on Yahoo! products. We met with members from BOSS, Pipes and YUI teams and even got ourselves on the YDN! Awesome!

The whole Silicon Valley experience was truly great. Some good mentoring and particular from the companies that we went to visit. Business wise was interesting. definitely opened some doors for the future. Thumbs up Seedcamp and a special thanks to Dave McClure

As we’ve previously posted, Team BaseKit been working with Swede to help us define the user experience. One thing we have to say about the people at Swede is that you can’t help but be inspired by their work. They sit you down, chat about your product and inject their sweet cerium that opens your mind to a cornucopia of concepts and ideas! They’ve been working hard on the user experience and feeling our users get when using BaseKit. It’s also great to have have a different slant on direction.

You can see so of the concepts they’ve created for BaseKit on their blog. Check them at the Swede Blog. Not only awesome at what they do but slap-on-the-back great guys too!

Cheers Swede!

We were invited down by the guys at Swede, a top brand and marketing strategy agency, to thrash out some ideas about BaseKit and see what help they could provide us. Slap bang in the center of London, we arrived at the offices at 8.30 in the morning at the SEP offices and greeted with a warm cup of tea and awesome mentors!

We did this awesome road mapping exercise which helped up to get all our ideas out our heads and on the table (literally!) Check out the Swede website for their take on the exercise.

Awesome guys who helped us really define BaseKit.

As part of the FOWA experience, we were asked by Ryan Carson to join a discussion panel organized by Adobe to talk about the future of web apps and how Adobe Air fits in to the current market. We rocked up early to ExCel in East London and after walking into the wrong room, straight into the middle of a Carsonifed Workshop (the arrangements definitely said Room 7!!!), we eventually found our place.

The room was lightly flickered with industry illuminates that have gathered to chat. Simon Willison from Django, Stefan Magdalinski from Moo and the (brilliant!) Francisco of 280 Slides / ObjectiveJ fame. We talked about the internet and its current state. We explored browser technology and looked deeply at what role the desktop plays in the current industry and what role it will play in the future. We also looked at the mobile web and how things how mobile technology will progress internet platform technologies forward.

We also looked how the guys Howard Baines created Alert Thingy. They used Air to develop their app and disclosed how it stands up as a development environment and what advantages / disadvantages it gave them. Really interestingly, a lot of the discussion was geared towards  the Installation Process of Air and the pitfalls it runs into.

Other Air Demos were also shown. The one that sparked everyones imagination was the The Sun’s Desktop Keeley.

Some really interesting quotes that I picked up were:

“I’m more towards View Source rather than Open Source”

“There’s a view that info that we have on the desktop is more important than on the net”

Future developments of BaseKit may well include desktop resources. How far we take that we don’t know yet. But it was an enlighting chat anyway.

Thanks for Adobe and Ryan Carson for inviting us down.