So this thing called the Internet makes it easy for pretty much anyone to have a voice and get messages across. The problem is that building beautiful, intuitive websites typically requires some knowledge of code. New York City-based Scroll Kit is trying to change that, with an intuitive web app that allows anyone to build compelling experiences with no background knowledge necessary.
Scroll Kit provides users with what’s basically an empty canvas on which they can place anything — text, pictures, whatever — and with one click publish it to the web. The product goes beyond most WYSIWYG web editors, allowing users to control pretty much every pixel of a page and rearrange page elements at will. While the tool proves that you don’t need to know how to code to build something beautiful, the real point is to show that even if you do know how to code, that doesn’t mean you will be able to build a great website.
Up until now, Scroll Kit has been operating pretty quietly, letting early users create sites and rolling out features to support the product. The two-person team, made up of Cody Brown and Kate Ray, basically issued a manifesto today on how the future of the web should be accessible to anyone. The three key tenets: providing an open canvas for development, letting users get feedback from people they know, and allowing people to “play” — that is, making website building actually fun.
So far, Scroll Kit users have primarily used the site to build personal websites and web-based birthday or holiday cards to share with friends and family. Everything that gets published is hosted by Scroll Kit, and the team continues to add new features. Those include custom domains — so that users can host their creations on their own URLs — as well as embeddable videos, and the ability for users to draw their own images. The service is essentially free, but Scroll Kit plans to make money by charging for additional features.
Scroll Kit is currently just the two founders, but it’s been funded and is looking to bring on more designers and engineers to further extend its capabilities. The startup raised just short of $225,000 in seed funding to do so.
