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Build your own website at Moonfruit.com

Friday, August 6 2010

My Moonfruit Experience - By Ian Pinnell

When you look at websites, you think “it looks stunning”, “I love this!”, “this is actually really easy to use, I’ll bookmark this” or maybe you criticise.

That’s what I thought way back when in 2006. I hadn’t actually had my own website prior to this point, the only websites I saw were for the places I worked or volunteered for. Being in the media industry, and studying media at College, I thought it was high time I got myself onto the web.

With that, I cracked open my laptop, and set to work on Dreamweaver. As lovely as that was, it was a pain having to check every five minutes to see if the website code you had written corresponded to what you wanted the website to look like. I couldn’t design my own website in the end, not with Dreamweaver. So, I got on one of those template sites, downloaded my favourite, and just edited the photos and text with my images.

That was great at the time, but then I discovered Moonfruit! If only I had discovered this excellent service before!

I was quick to set up a free website, just to see how everything worked, and within a couple of weeks, I had my own .moonfruit.com website, it was one of those “I love this!” websites, visitors could visit and check out my work, and editing it was really easy, with the “what you see is what you get” focus on the editing. Pure brilliance.

Then, towards the end of 2008, I thought about setting up my own business, which of course needed its own website, and it was straight back to Moonfruit I went. Christmas Eve, I registered my domain and got started editing my website within minutes. I love all of the features and added extras, including the social features, audio players, and of course the “what you see is what you get” look.

I no longer needed to keep refreshing the site every five minutes to see if it looked how I wanted it, because I knew that wherever I was putting things on the page, that’s how they would appear to users.

As my business is expanding, so is my website, and I make use of all the available features, including the Membership feature which I’m using as a Client Login section, so my clients can catch up on information related to their order. To do this manually, for me anyway, would have taken forever!

It’s fair to say, I’ve had one or two problems, well, they’ve not really been problems, just enquiries, and I have had a brilliant response from the Moonfruit team every time I’ve emailed, they’re true to their word when they say they’ll be back in touch asap, and they’re friendly too!

I’ve made a lot of decisions in my life, and deciding to have Moonfruit as the host of my website was a brilliant one. Fantastic service, brilliant website tools, and lots of Moonfruit loveliness.

Here’s a thanks to Moonfruit, keep up the brilliant work, and I shall be recommending you to family and friends!

Ian Pinnell - http://www.pinnellproductions.co.uk/

Tuesday, June 22 2010

My Moonfruit Experience - by Simon Waller

SWLostI’ve learned a lot of important things in my 37 years on this planet.

I learned to walk and run and climb trees. I then learned how to dress myself and play football and snowboard. I learned how to make friends and lose them and I learned how to get a job. I learned that shouting wasn’t the answer and that I looked like an idiot with long hair, although I never realised it at the time. I learned to earn money and take care of my family but that however much money you have, it’s never enough. Then I learned about Moonfruit.

Now you may think it’s over-cooking it a little to compare Moonfruit with my lifetime of accomplishments…but then, it really is a rather good website tool.

I became a father in 2006 and immediately came under pressure to deliver a constant stream of up-to-the-second snapshots of our new addition to friends and relatives based all over the world. Actually when you stop to think about it, it’s pretty incredible that 5 years ago my family in Spain were demanding instant pictures when 5 years before that they hadn’t heard of bloody email! Anyway, since then another two bundles of joy have arrived and the pressure to keep everyone up to speed hasn’t eased.

So, here I am in 2006 and my Dreamweaver skills have peaked at just short of ‘novice’. I was spending more time updating my rubbish website than I was my spending with my own newborn child. It was time for a change. It was time to find a better way to build a website that did the job quickly and looked professional too.

I stumbled on Moonfruit, I’ve no idea now how I found it, but when I did I loved it instantly. I built a basic picture gallery site and have been refining it ever since. It’s fair to say that I’d be lost without it.

Having said all that, there is another reason for my love affair with Moonfruit. It represents all that is good in a modern company. It has a public face… Joe is real, and he answers your emails. It is progressive and inclusive and is striving to improve itself. It listens when you have a problem and it is interested in your little successes in life. Now if Moonfruit were a real person, you’d be saying ” Hey, that Moonfruit is a great guy isn’t he!” and you’d be right. If Moonfruit were a real person, I’d want to be his mate, he’d definitely have my back, and I imagine he’d have a way with the ladies; but I digress.

I have yet more reasons to be such a Moonfruit evangelist. I am a two time winner of recent competitions. One for innovative use of design for this piece of nonsense http://thingsihavelearned.moonfruit.com for which I won a year of free hosting and more recently the #flymeto competition for which I won a trip to Tokyo with my wife. So, call me biased, but I love those crazy Moonfruit guys.

To me, Moonfruit is more than a webhost. The world is full of hosting companies, and I should know, I work for one of largest in the world, but I use Moonfruit because it makes my life easy and it provides a vibrant community of like-minded misfits to shoot the breeze with.

I’m no designer and I’m no techy and I am sure there are a whole host of reasons why one host is better for this and one is better for that and I would probably agree with you, if I understood what you said (which I probably wouldn’t). But forgetting the nuts and bolts for a minute Moonfruit is a company I really enjoy using. I’ve been a customer for around 5 years and in that time I’ve recommended scores of friends and family to sign up. I’ve never had anything but thanks for the recommendation and that’s important ’cos there’s nothing worse than disappointing your friends.

So, thanks for the great service (and the flights to Tokyo!!!), and keep up the good work

Simon Waller

Thursday, May 27 2010

How to get started with Moonfruit by Slikk Designs

There are many things you should do before launching any website, but the main thing that springs to my mind is patience! I often see a lot of people launching their website before it’s anywhere near complete. I know it’s hard to beat temptation because of the excitement of developing your new website, but ultimately your website is there for a reason and that’s to increase sales, promote you’re brand and broaden your market. Launching an unfinished website can have the opposite effect.

You’re website is your online face to represent you as a company or artist so it’s vital customers get a good impression of that when visiting your website, because first impressions count! It’s pretty simple. If your website looks fresh and professional the customer thinks you are fresh and professional. If you have an unfinished website then.... you know the rest!

Colours Scheme

It is important that you get the colour scheme right throughout the website. Here is a useful link to a website that shows you which colours complement each other best. http://www.colorblender.com

colourscheme





Font sizes

Another thing that always catches my eye on a website is the font sizes. Maybe I have issues and am somewhat very picky but little things like this really polish your website off. Try to keep the website universal throughout, so for example title headers 14px and normal text 12px, then add bold to particular things that need to stand out from the rest. There is nothing worse than a website which has huge writing scattered all over in different places and sizes.

Navigation

Filter the website content in the best possible way. Map it out in your head as if you were a visitor and develop the website in an idiot-proof manner. Make sure everything is nice and tight and only one click away if possible. That doesn’t mean put everything on one page but you get my point!

Checkout one of my websites for an example on navigation http://www.elizabethgeorgebridal.co.uk as here you can see how everything relevant is tied together so customers can find exactly what they want without any distractions.

ElizGeo Website

Getting people to your website

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is very important. Maybe not so much for artist websites but certainly for business based websites. People need to be able to find you when typing keywords into Google and the way to do this is to work with Google. Not officially of course but make your website easier to read! Here are a few pointers to help with this.

When logged in you will see “Admin” tab. Click that then go to “Site information” inside you will see the following: Site name column - Moonfruit only allow 50 characters anyway which is perfect. Site keywords - This tag should have no more than 20 words. Anything more will be considered as NOT robot friendly. Site description - This tag shouldn’t contain more than 200 characters. Anything more will be considered as NOT robot friendly. All the above tags need to be relevant to each other and relevant to what content you have on your website (Page content).

SlikkSEO

Hope this has been a help for you in a way. If you need any further help or suggestions please feel free to contact me on paul@slikkdesign.com / www.slikkdesign.com

Good luck with your website.

Paul Bowen

Friday, May 21 2010

New monthly competition and more...

It was a great week last week. I have seen participation in our groups rise, which is great! We love to hear from you guys, so please do continue to communicate with us through the various channels. I've received some great feedback.

Site of the day has been going for almost 2 months now and is proving to be extremely popular. We have decided to turn this into a monthly competition and give away a prize for the best site every month, starting from May. The winners will be chosen from the 'Site of the day' winners of that month. Giving you more reason to submit your site everyday :) Prizes will vary, but no matter what, you'll get a great goody bag! so... keep them coming! Submit your sites via any of our groups or email.

We also launched Guest Posts from our users last week. The first post was by Anthony Mayatt, a self employed personal trainer, who gave us a great insight into how by using Moonfruit gave his business a professional look and any changes could be easily made by himself when he wanted them made. If you would be interested in contributing to the Moonfruit Lounge with your Moonfruit story, please email us.

Don't forget we are now on LinkedIn as well as Twitter and Facebook.

Thursday, May 20 2010

Guest Post: My first website - Anthony Mayatt

Creating my first website

AMBFI've been a personal trainer by trade for over 6 years now, and for my industry its vital that you have a good website to get business. In my 6 years I had a website that was made and managed by my brother. Which, in the beginning, was good as it was cheap and you had someone you could trust to manage it for you. The problem was that his work increased so that any time I wanted something done to the site it took a few weeks for it to be done, which I wasn't happy with. Around the time that I was looking for a new person to manage my site I was made redundant from the gym I was managing due to the financial climate so I decided from there to become self employed and do everything myself. One issue now was that I could not afford a web designer and my brothers work resulted in him going abroad so that was out the question too.

Moonfruit

My brother emailed me one day recommending me to look up sites where you can build and manage them yourself (something I didn't know existed) so I joined a lot of various sites but found they just didn't do what I wanted them too. A few days later I got another email from my brother telling me about Moonfruit and how it is highly recommended and won various awards so should give that a try. I joined it immediately and will be truthful didn’t like it at first as it takes me a while to get the hang of things. After some practice I realised it did everything I needed so started to create a free site. I liked the site so much and was able to put in absolutely everything I wanted including things my last site didn't have. I then chose to sign up to the lite package as I only wanted to add basic things to my site that you couldn't do when making it for free.

BreatheFitness

Once completed

The site has now been live a couple of months and to be completely honest I have got more out of this site than I did in the last 5 years of my previous site. It was made site of the day here at Moonfruit and also I’ve got a lot of business from it, as I went through the sites SEO guide to help the website get found on search engines.

I know this may sound like I'm writing an article to get everyone to sign up to Moonfruit, but I’m doing this purely because I never thought for such a low price and by making it myself I could get what I wanted and more. Everyday I am coming up with new ideas what to add to the site and doing that doesn't take long at all. I also like the fact that there’s a friendly community here, as the other web builder sites don't tend to have that so its nice to see sites that others have made here giving ideas on how to improve my own.

There's no way I could write all that and now promote my own site for you to see and if you do like it then any comments I am sure will flatter me :-)

Thank you Moonfruit

Anthony Mayatt, Personal Trainer, Breathe Fitness http://www.breathefitness.uk.com

Friday, May 14 2010

Moonfruit LinkedIn Group

It's great to be back at Moonfruit HQ after a couple of weeks off to get married and relax on honeymoon. As you can imagine, it's been a very busy week, catching up on emails, messages and tweets! Thank you to all of those who sent us lovely wedding messages :)

Linked in Smaller logoThis week, I've been working on setting up the new LinkedIn Group. LinkedIn is a great place to engage with people on a more professional basis and is also a great place for more in depth conversations. I'm in the process of setting up specialist sub-groups and would love to hear your feedback on what they should be. Please feel free to add your thoughts on our product as well as suggestions and any relevant news you might come across.

We've had some great sites of the day this week too. Go and check them out on our Facebook group and if you would like to be in with a chance of being our featured site of the day, please don't forget to submit them on Facebook, Twitter and now LinkedIn :)

Have a great weekend!

--Leila

Friday, April 23 2010

Moonfruit at Geek n Rolla

GeeknRolla 2010It’s been a pretty busy week here at Moonfruit HQ. I went to the popular Geek n Rolla event run by TechCrunch Europe on Tuesday, which went ahead despite the chaos caused by the volcano, Eyjafjallajokull. It was held in the glamorous Park Plaza hotel in Waterloo and despite the air disruption, had a fantastic turnout.

The day consisted of presentations, startup pitches and a demo pit. Talks on the day included Morten Lund (Skype), Andrew J Scott (Rummble) and Ewan Mc Leod ( Mobile Industry Review) who were my personal favourites as well as various Venture Capitalists and other successful entrepreneurs sharing their tips on how to be successful. The pitching event was won by Cortexica who are provide a platform for "Visual Search products that deliver exciting new experiences and value for consumers and businesses." Other startup’s pitching included Decibel, iGlue and SongHi who were very well received. Overall the day a great success. The food during the breaks was delicious and there were lots of people walking around with our lovely Moonfruit button stickers which is always nice to see :)

Shak from Spotify with his Moonfruit BadgeThe rest of my week has been spent researching new and fun ways to interact with the community. Don’t forget, if you have any ideas, I would love to hear them. Please email me with your thoughts, ideas and general feedback to social@moonfruit.com – We also have some great new features coming up in the following months, so stay tuned to the Moonfruit Lounge for the latest info!

Next week I will be at Internet World at Earls Court. Leave me a message if you'll be there :)

Have a great weekend!

Leila

Friday, April 16 2010

A month at Moonfruit

I’ve been at Moonfruit for an entire month now, which is hard to believe. How time flies when you’re having fun!

I’ve spent a lot of my time in the past month finding my way around the product as well as talking to our users via the Moonfruit forum, Twitter and Facebook. The comments and feedback from everyone has been great. It’s given me a much better understanding of the Moonfruit community as a whole.

We’ve introduced ‘Site of the Day’ which has been very popular amongst our Twitter and Facebook followers. The Facebook group is going from strength to strength and we now have over 300 fans, many of which have been contributing to it on a daily basis. Do keep an eye out on the Facebook group over the next few months as we will be making a few changes as well as announcing up and coming features and some exciting new competitions.

In the mean time, I would love to hear your ideas – I have been sent some great ideas for competitions as well as new features people would like to see implemented. Your thoughts are very important to us.

I will be keeping you up to date on what’s happening here at Moonfruit HQ every Friday. If there’s a particular subject you would like me to cover, please email me: social@moonfruit.com

Finally, I just wanted to thank everyone for making me feel so welcome.

Leila