About Basker
The CMS and website builder for live events.
Basker is the content management system and website builder for organisations that put on live events: theatres, performing arts venues, museums, and cultural institutions. Wherever people come together for a shared experience, Basker powers the website that works hard to bring them there.
These are some of the most demanding sites to build and run. They have to mirror a live ticketing system in real time, stay fast enough to rank and convert, and not crash when an on-sale sends traffic through the roof. Basker is built to handle all of it.
Basker isn't a ticketing system. It works alongside the ticketing platform you already use, whether Tessitura, Spektrix, or something else, keeping your website in sync with what's on sale. Ticketing is just one connection. Basker includes a growing set of integrations that switch on like apps, linking your site to the other tools you rely on to run your organisation. Basker powers everything your audience experiences on the way there.
Why we built it
Basker was born from over a decade of building websites for arts and cultural organisations, only to hit the same walls every time. The projects were long. The upgrades were painful and expensive. While no team ever truly starts from a blank page, in practice, every site became its own codebase, and every upgrade or new project tended to become another one.
We've always looked for the best technologies, open-source and otherwise, to meet the needs of these complex websites, and the honest answer is that nothing really fits. There are plenty of capable website builders and SaaS platforms, but none understand events. Seasons, performances, on-sales, venues, the link between a work and the artists performing it: general-purpose tools treat all of that as an afterthought, if they handle it at all.
At the same time, a few forces were converging. It became clear that building websites was about to be reshaped by AI and a new wave of web technology. Organisations were asked to do more with less. Audience expectations of what a website should do kept climbing.
So we built a different kind of answer: a single, continuously improving CMS and website builder delivered as a service. Basker launched publicly in July 2024 after a year of research and development.
How it works
Basker is a modern SaaS-based solution: a single CMS and shared codebase serving every organisation on it. There are no separate installs to maintain and no versions to fall behind on. When Basker improves something for one venue, every venue benefits instantly.
We've architected Basker to handle peak on-sale traffic, drawing on years of building applications that must stay up when everyone arrives at once. That means no waiting rooms, no degraded performance, and no panicked phone calls, however busy the on-sale.
For people building and running sites day-to-day, the editor is visual and block-based, with a live preview showing exactly what your audience will see on any device. For developers, Basker's theming is flexible and quick to work with: flexible enough for fully bespoke designs, quick enough to get a site live fast, and editable in code or directly in the browser.
Made to perform
Basker was born out of Made Media, a digital agency known for accessible, well-designed websites for the organisations that bring people together: performing arts companies, museums and cultural institutions. Made has specialised in this work, including deep Tessitura integration, for well over a decade, and is trusted by established organisations across the sector.
Basker is an independent company within the group. It has its own product, its own engineering team, its own roadmap and its own customers. Made builds on Basker for its client websites at every scale, and so do other agencies and in-house teams. Whether your site is designed by Made, built by your own developers, or put together by you without writing a line of code, the same Basker runs underneath.
That's deliberate. Basker is part of Made's wider strategy, but it's built and run as its own thing precisely so it can be opened up: the same CMS, the same know-how and the same technology, available to everyone in the sector rather than locked inside one agency.
Who we are
Basker is led by its co-founders, Séalan Cronin and James Baggaley.
Séalan has spent over a decade building websites for live events organisations and runs Basker day-to-day operations as Managing Director, leading a product team in London. James is CEO of Made Media and directs the strategy and operations of the wider Made Media group.
Fast facts
- Basker is the content management system and website builder for live events: theatres, performing arts venues, museums, and cultural institutions.
- Basker launched publicly in July 2024, after a year of research and development.
- Basker is an independent company within the Made Media group, with its own product, engineering team, roadmap, and customers.
- Basker is led by co-founders Séalan Cronin, Managing Director, and James Baggaley, who is also CEO of Made Media.
- Basker integrates natively with ticketing systems including Tessitura, Spektrix, Elevent, Tixly, and Line-Up.
- Basker publishes transparent subscription pricing and offers a 14-day free trial.
What we're here to do
Bringing live events to life and selling out the house is hard enough. The website shouldn't be the part that keeps you up at night.
Our mission is simple: make digital easy, so you can focus on what you do best: delighting your audiences.