I would have almost passed by WebKite had it not been for Eric Silver’s advanced tech-event floor skills: WebKite’s founder cleverly got my attention by asking if I wanted to learn more about his Pittsburg-based startup. It worked, and I’m glad I stopped by. WebKite extends the table metaphor to its logical conclusion: building an entire site from a spreadsheet.
I’ve seen and used table-driven visualizers and web-page generators from the likes of Piktochart, Knack, Socrata, and Google Fusion. But WebKite builds complete websites that are highly searchable. Based on your data, it will automatically create filter boxes so that site visitors can find, say, all fair-trade coffee beans between $10 and $20 per pound.
And WebKite can also turn those spreadsheets into broader categories, which are represented in a site hierarchy as topic landing pages–i.e., fair-trade coffee from South America, from Ethiopia, etc. With the zillions of combinations possible for these machine generated pages, WebKite steps in to intelligently title them and optimize for SEO. Nice work.
The table metaphor fits better with say online consumer retailers or sites that aggregate pricing and other information from said e-retailers. But the concept also works with lots of other use cases: contact directories, inventories for B-2-B, and restaurant menus. On that latter point, we both agreed that for a certain kind of food establishiment, WebkKite would be more than adequate, and far better than some of the DIY efforts I’ve come across.
WebKite starts at $79 per month and includes a free trial period. It’s one of the more practical and useable SMB web tools I’ve seen in a good long while.