Moonfruit Lounge - General chat

Get your business cards designed for you by a professional!

leila — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 17:03:00 +0100

Are your business cards in need of an urgent creative fix? If so, our friends over at Moo.com have just the competition for you! Moo are giving 500 people the chance to get their business cards designed by a top class professional along with a free pack of 50 cards. All you have to do is say why you think you need a revamp and provide them with your current business cards for them to review. Each revamp will be worth $500 with a total prize fund of a staggering $250,000.

Moo are an award-winning online stationer, specializing in customized printing for individuals and small businesses. Their team is passionate about what they do, just like the Moonfruit team and always dedicated to providing the highest quality service/ products. Combined, Moo and Moonfruit give you the perfect marketing solution to make your small business look professional online and offline.

Business cards are a great way to promote your company, product or service. People with attractive, eyecatching cards are less likely to be forgotten easily, so to be in with the chance of being the one that stands out, vist Moo's special competition site for more details - Business Card Project.

Moonfruit have a new Community Manager!

leila — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:11:00 +0000

Hi, I'm Leila, the new Moonfruit Community Manager. I started yesterday at Moonfruit HQ and am settling in nicely.

If anyone has any questions, suggestions or issues, please point them in my direction. I'm known by my nickname 'Swanny' on the Moonfruit forums and can be found tweeting as @moon_swan. Please feel free to say hello. I would love to hear any suggestions you have and would especially like to hear about your experience with Moonfruit as a whole. If you would prefer to email me, I can be reached on social@moonfruit.com.

We have a facebook fan page, which some of you might know about already - http://www.facebook.com/moonfruit . Unfortunately, the fan page was a little neglected due to a huge increase in our customer base. However, we're back on track and I'll be checking this on a regular basis.

If you know of any other Moonfruit communities on the web, or would like a group/ community to be created elsewhere, please contact me through one of mediums above to discuss further.

I'm very much looking forward to getting to know you all.

Leila

3 Jobs @ Moonfruit - Flash/Flex + Javascript/HTML + Sys Admin

Joe — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:49:00 +0000

Hurray, jobs at moonfruit!! We're running to keep pace with you wonderful customers, so we're keen to boost the size of team moonfruit to help us kick off 2010 with a super new power team. Are you a Flex superhero? Can you write Javascript while tied up upside-down? Can you keep servers running during an alien attack? If the answer to any of these is yes, you could be kind of person we're looking for.

We're moving into a cool new office in Jan. It's spacious, floor to ceiling windows nr Oxford Circus and Soho. We need folks to fill the space (and up our DJ Hero scores)!

And if you know anyone for whom any of the answers to these might be yes, tell them too. We're known to reward people from time to time with shiny new mac products...

Full details below.

Flex/Flash Developer – OO, Actionscript, FlexUnit, Scrum

You must have an understanding of Object Oriented programming, 3 or more years as a Flex/Actionscript developer, with a degree/or equivalent in computer science. Additional experience of Flash, Actionscript, Actionscript 2, SVN, FlexUnit/ASUnit and Flex in all its different incarnations (including Flex 4 beta) would be helpful.

Front end developer - (X)HTML/CSS/JavaScript/UI

Essential skills in HTML, CSS, W3C web standards, JavaScript, Ajax, Browser bugs/inconsistencies, UI/Design skills. JQuery or similar and Macromedia Flash/Flex coding would be beneficial. Again 3 or more years experience as well as a degree/or equivalent in computer science.

Sys admin - Linux (RedHat/CentOs preferred)/Apache
Experienced sys admin with running Linux based servers. Additional DBA experience (Sybase/MSSQL)/Perl an advantage – 3 years+ experience

All roles will

Work in a mixed skill development team, using Scrum to release new product features every 4-6 weeks under the direction of the CTO. You will be comfortable using different technologies/languages as necessary to meet overall team objectives, though remain an expert in your area of experience. You will have the opportunity to lead development cycles, provide creative solutions to challenging problems, and help shape the direction of the Moonfruit Website building application.

CVs to jobs (at) moonfruit.com!

#flymeto Creative website competition Winner and Top 10

Joe — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:47:00 +0000

Oooo this was a toughy. There was a flurry of entries on Friday from people who've clearly spent some time working on their #flymeto websites for the chance to win the last set of tickets to their dream destination. It's been a pretty tough decision going through them all and working out who the winner is. In fact too tough. So we've decided to give prizes for 1st, 2nd and 3rd places...

Winner!! - 1st prize of a $3500 holiday to Tokyo Japan from the UK!!
@SimonCwaller: Hi chaps, here is my entry for the #flymeto competition. I hope you enjoy it!

http://flymetotokyo.moonfruit.com

1st runner up - 2nd prize that we made up because it was too hard to pick. These guys will get $2000 towards their trip, which will hopefully nearly get them there ;-)
@netscribe http://twitpic.com/ohp0v - @moontweet #flymeto where the cherry blossoms bloom.

http://tokyobound.moonfruit.com

2nd runner up - winner of a shiny new ipod touch
@tom_hayward: @moontweet #flymeto my updated NYC Site for the contest :) thanks

http://newyorkfeeling.moonfruit.com

3. http://flymetohawaii.moonfruit.com
@sweet_teets: @moontweet Here is my website design for the game of skill: http://flymetohawaii.moonfruit.com #flymeto

4. http://www.flymetotokyojapan.moonfruit.com
@Timiwriter: @moontweet #flymeto Japan check out my website while I was eating #moonfruit http://www.flymetotokyojapan.moonfruit.com/

5. http://dreamnz.moonfruit.com
@ auntiedragon Despite the lovely snow it's still dark and depressing. I wonder if @moontweet would make this come true: http://dreamnz.moonfruit.com/

6. http://www.flymetothailand.moonfruit.com
@philimobi: @moontweet #flymeto Thailand, one country, million reasons to visit, check my site http://www.flymetothailand.moonfruit.com

7. http://pooh.moonfruit.com/
@49Chen @moontweet. Please #flymeto Sydney, even though I've written a website about New York. http://pooh.moonfruit.com

8. http://jenngw.moonfruit.com/
@jenngw: @moontweet My love letter to the place I'd like you to #flymeto: London. http://jenngw.moonfruit.com I had a blast making the site! Thanks!

9. http://londoncalling.moonfruit.com/
@jonathanwthomas: @moontweet Right-o, here's the awesome website I created for the contest: http://bit.ly/1QOX24 - can you confirm my entry? #flymeto

10. http://dreambig2california.moonfruit.com
@SparkleFreak here's the final product of my site:) #flymeto Hollywood, CALI http://bit.ly/3C8gp0

Thank you to everyone who contributed to this competition over the past week. We've loved your responses, humour and creativity. If we could we'd #flyyouall to see us ;-)

Our partnership with MOO and free MOO card giveaway!

Wendy — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:53:00 +0100

We’ve partnered with MOO, who love to print! You can use your own images, logos and content to customise your own business cards and personal products. Much like Moonfruit, MOO provides easy to use edit tools to customise your business cards and they also love good design.

We came across MOO when we needed to print our own business cards and we loved them so much we thought your might like to use them too for your projects and business ventures. We know many of you have fabulous images, designs and logos which you already use for your Moonfruit sites. MOO also think their customers might like to build Moonfruit sites to promote their projects, businesses and communities.

So to kick off the partnership we've been promoting some unique offers to our customers.

MOO customers have been taking advantage of a discount on Moonfruit premium packages and 200 packs of 50 free MOO cards have been snapped up by Moonfruit premium subscribers.

We wanted everyone in the Moonfruit community to participate in the partnership so here's an offer for everyone. 10,000 free packs of 50 MOO cards.

Click here to get your free pack.

Enjoy!

The Moonfruit Team

Creative Moonfruit Website Award and Thankyou to Twitter, Twitterers and Moonfruiters

Wendy — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 16:40:00 +0100

Following on from the incredible range of creative and humorous responses you sent in, we decided to give out one last prize, an 11th macbook pro for the most creative Moonfruit website. Again the diversity and calibre of the websites produced have been impressive.

Thank you to all Twitterers and Moonfruiters old and new for engaging in this campaign with such enthusiasm, creativity and large injections of humour! We'll continue to chat to you about our new product innovations, things you're up to and interesting design stuff. We'd also like to continue doing a variety of creative projects with you in areas you are passionate about. We have some ideas brewing but if you have any suggestions they would be very welcome!

We'd also like give one big thankyou to Twitter itself. Without their boundary breaking, communication platform, this would not have been possible.

As explained in our previous blog "We'll pick the site that is most true to its stated objective and inspires us as a great example of what a website can do. Build it about something you're passionate about and are interested in."

People put a lot of effort and thought into their sites and to be fair to everyone we thought we should explain the process we've been through to choose the winner(s).

A team of three, Kevin our lead designer, 'Web Guy' Dan and myself sat down and looked through every entry. We then chose our favourite 30 with a bit of wrangling, our top 10 with a lot of arguing and hair pulling and finally we chose a winner ... thankfully unanimously!

WINNER: Creative Moonfruit Website

Wins Macbook Pro "13

@sloorp - sloorp.moonfruit.com

HIGHLY COMMENDED

Win Sitemaker Max Package for 1 year (an extra year for existing customers).

OUR FAVOURITE 30

www.flickr.com/photos/40593155@N08/sets/72157621596748144

CREATIVE COMPETITION PICTURES

Just a few (thousand) of the many awesome pictures you guys sent in, THANKYOU!

www.flickr.com/photos/40593155@N08/sets/72157621912820609

Final creative prize for a Macbook Pro

Joe — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:46:00 +0100

Thank you all for making this competition so special. The creative entries have really blown us away and we'll be continuing to pick through them all, post up the best and create a gallery to pay our respects for all those who have entered. (And maybe a few discretionary prizes too ending Friday 10th July 3pm BST).

But we thought we'd end this crazy Twitter promotion with one more Macbook Pro prize. And this will go to the creator of the best website on Moonfruit.com. Anyone can enter from new or old customers, friends or foes, and you certainly don't have to enter if you don't want to ;-).

The website contest will run until 17th July (next Friday 3pm BST) at which point we'll pick and announce the winner.

Judging a website is going to be tricky, so when you enter your website we want you to tell us why it's special or innovative and why you think it should win. All entries should be as comments on this blog and we'll pick the winner from there. We'll pick the site that is most true to its stated objective and inspires us as a great example of what a website can do. Build it about something you're passionate about and are interested in.

Thanks again for all your support and may the Fruit be with you. Always.

Rules

Create a website on www.moonfruit.com
Post it on this blog with your reasons for why it should be picked
One website entry per person (and one post please!)
Winner will be posted to this blog on 17th July at 3pm BST (GMT+1)
Good luck!

What a nice thing to say

Joe — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 14:04:00 +0000

This one made me laugh, so I thought I'd publish it here too. I especially like the point about Jelly Tots, a much underrated confectionary if you ask me!

"what can you get for under £50 these days ?mmmmm..." other than the Moonfruit website builder of course!

hire out a washing machine man for one hour
24 decent curries from waitrose (that's without pilau rice)
2 drum lessons
a train ticket from bristol to chelthnam (that's not far)
2000 jelly tots (without the packaging)
2 days worth of petrol (that's if you drive like Michael Schumacher - I try)
2 pots of Clinique moisturising cream
a night out on the town with the chicks (this is a tame night by the way)
18 cups of grande lattes from starbucks
A YEARS WORTH OF THE BEST SITE BUILDING PACKAGE THIS SIDE OF THE UNIVERSE FOR UNDER £50 FROM MOONFRUIT! Which includes, emails, storage space, 247 support, advert free, ecommerce tools, membership tools, hosting, video players, picture galleries, mp3 jukebox, widget library, forums, the ability to move everything about in a moment, (wow) all this and more along with the ability to BUILD A PROFESSIONAL GROOVY SITE THAT CAN HELP GENERATE YOU AN INCOME! Of course everything has hiccups, but concentrating on the rightness in people will generate more rightness , these guys and gals from moonfruit have put together an amazing package, it is cost efficient ,and makes it easy for everyone to get creative, with the potential of earning a living from it. Moonfruit has been my best investment to date. Thanks!"

- Alison

A good point, well made ;-). Any ideas for other good things for £50?

Joe

2,000,000th website competition winner!

Joe — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 16:10:00 +0000

Well, the results are in! We passed the 2,000,000 site mark on Jan 12th 2009, so it was a great start to the year. We then froze the competition at that point and looked back at all the sites that were created from the day the competition started (28 Nov 2008) to create our lucky list. And the winner is....

...wait for it...

....http://papercocktail.moonfruit.com/ !!!

Once we had our list of about 35,000 sites that qualified for entry we picked a random number and Paper Cocktail turned up. And what a great site it is. It's a new business starting out in the world of wedding stationery and we're very happy to be able to support new businesses especially in the current climate.

Paper Cocktail describes themselves as "a stationery specialist with a stunning collection of wedding stationery, that blends beautiful handmade papers with our contemporary design philosophy. We recognise the importance of the wedding invitation in terms of introducing the style of our clients wedding to their family and friends and we believe in creating a first impression that will last forever!". So you can see that this kind of designer eye lends itself well to Moonfruit's visual design tools.

When I wrote a note to Mary, the owner of the site, to tell her that she had won, it proved more difficult than I thought. If you've ever tried writing an email with "You've won £1000", you'll suddenly notice that it sounds a bit spammy (or is that scammy?) and a little suspect. So I had to fill it with "this is genuine", "I really am the MD of Moonfruit", "please give me a call if you want to", etc. Gratefully, Mary did believe me and was kind enough to tell us what she thought about Moonfruit.

"As a company Paper Cocktail has a strong design ethic and it was very important to us that our website mirrored our contemporary design philosophy while showcasing our collection in a user friendly manner. Having tried (and failed!) to build a website with a number of the other website builders and tools available online, we were delighted to discover SiteMaker. As we have no web publishing experience, we were pleasantly surprised at Site Maker’s ease of use, flexibility in terms of design options and the number of tools and widgets available. We believe that SiteMaker will allow us to develop an effective web presence at an exceptionally low cost, which again is advantageous to our growing organisation. We are still developing our website and we are looking forward to including a few more items from SiteMaker's “box of tricks” to further enhance our visitors web experience!"

Gosh, it made me blush.

So there you have it, www.papercocktail.moonfruit.com is the winner and we wish them every success in their new business venture!

And thanks to all of you who entered and helped us reach our 2m site goal. Onwards to 3,000,000!

Did We Really Do All That? 2008 - Not a Bad Vintage

Walt — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:15:00 +0000

Wow, what a year it's been. When we sat down and looked back at what he had done this year we were quite surprised. So we thought we'd give you a summary of all the changes and improvements we made to SiteMaker during 2008, as we'd even forgotten about a few of them ourselves!

Here they are in the order they arrived. My haven't we been busy...

8 Feb 2008 - First Release of the Year!

Updating page URLs and bookmarking
Undo/redo (for moves and scales)
SEO improvements (page title changes)
Forum improvements

March 19 - New Showhome Sites

25 March - The One with the SEO Guide

New SEO guide added to the moonfruit.com portal
'Viewport' added to make sure the Editor is always available onscreen
Improvements to W3C compliance and some tidy up
Making Title tags more prominent in the HTML
'Show Homes' page and links added to moonfruit.com
Addition of 10 new templates
Improvements to multiple selection with changes to using the Control or Shift keys

28th March - Changes to the Way HTML is Generated

H1 tag - The first Title text box on a page is now rendered as an H1 tag
H3 tags - Text boxes with only bold text and less than 120 characters will be converted to an H3 tag
No more boxes around text - The HTML now ignores text box dimensions
New "View HTML Version" on the Page Settings panel

2 April 2008 - Bug Fixes and Site Updates

Blurry thumbnails for the pop-up gallery, slide show and image effects fixed
Editor (File Manager and other panels) no longer hides in the top-left corner
Users can now set up Google Analytics with the new tracking code - the 'ga.js' tracking code
New SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) guide added to the moonfruit.com site

1st May - The Big One

Domain name module

Register and manage domain names through Moonfruit.com (good prices!)
Free domain name vouchers bundled with SiteMaker Standard, Plus and Max accounts

New File manager!

Larger, clearer and easier to use interface
User folders - create folders and organise your files
Integrated multiple file uploader (no more Javascript popup window or Java applet)
Native support for PNGs & GIFs (including preserving transparency)
Rename files and folders
Multiple select, delete and move
Improvements to SEO (HTML) version of sites (viewable from Edit->Page Settings->View HTML version)
Nested navigation list now mimics the Flash Version
Better grouping of elements, preserving things like tabular layout and sidebars

AdSense revenue share for SiteMaker Free users

Users of SiteMakerFree can sign up with Google to share ad revenue generated by their site
For each click on a ad on your Free site, you get 50% of the money
So now you get a free site AND free money!

Other stuff:

New design templates
New backgrounds
We've added new PayPal currencies: CZK, DKK, HUF, NZD, NOK, PLN, SGD, SEK, CHF

08 July - Our Summer Release

Free email accounts on Moonfruit domain names

Up to 5 mailboxes can be set up on each domain name you order with Moonfruit (purchases & vouchers)
Mailboxes can be accessed via webmail or using POP3 or IMAP
Each mailbox can have an unlimited number of aliases, e.g. names that go to the same mailbox
Or you can set up email forwarding to another email address you already have e.g. gmail, hotmail etc
Free Google AdWords vouchers for every subscriber
Get up to £50 pounds worth of Google AdWords vouchers with your subscription
Use the AdWords voucher to pay for ads on Google to direct traffic to your site
See www.moonfruit.com/adwords.html for details

Improved alternative HTML version (how the search engines see your site)

The HTML alternative for your site is now much prettier and better organised
Go to ('Edit' ->) 'View' -> 'HTML version' in the SiteMaker toolbar to see your HTML pages and navigate through them
You can then 'View source' on each of these pages to see your keywords and other meta data in the HTML

Advanced form improvements

You can now add a file upload field to your form so users can submit files
Files are uploaded to a specific folder of your choice in the file manager

15 September - The One with Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking widgets allow visitors to quickly bookmark the site to services like Digg, De.licio.us, and facebook - see the 'social bookmarking' folder in the File Manger to add one
Domain transfers - customers can now transfer domain names to moonfruit.com for use with their SiteMaker site and to benefit from the free webmail
New fonts - 20 new fonts added to the graphic fonts selection to enable further customisation of your site
The Comments widget now provides 'pages' so that the widget is more responsive when it contains lots of comments
Thumbnail images are now larger (144 x144px, up from 100 x100px) - which should improve quality on screen

13 October - Preferred Site Address

Addition of the preferred site address allowing choice of one domain name to take priority

20 October - The Small One

.co.uk transfers available

11 November - Moonfruit Resellers - a case study

Improvements to the reseller products
Now even easier to become a Moonfruit/SiteMaker reseller

18 December - Christmas present

Google maps integration
Add a Google map interface to your site so customers can find you!

So the eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed that despite releasing a lot of stuff this year, we released more in the first 9 months than we did in the last 3. Never fear, this is not a sign of things to come, nor related to the credit crunch (feature crunch?) , but simply a result of the things we've been working on.

As you will remember we've been promising improvements to the membership and e-Commerce features for some time. Work on both these areas has started and been ongoing for a number of months, but due to the size and complexity of these projects it has and is taking us quite some time to get them ready for you. Like everything in SiteMaker we want to make them powerful and easy, which are usually in opposition to each other as objective!

But bear with us, membership improvements will come in early 2009 as a platform for e-Commerce changes due early Q2.

The SiteMaker Team would like to take the opportunity to thank all our customers for their continued support and wish you a fantastic 2009!

Help us reach 2,000,000 websites, have a Xmas bonus

Joe — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 16:53:00 +0000

Who'd have thought it but we're rapidly approaching 2,000,000 websites built using SiteMaker. We are of course very proud of this achievement and it goes to show how many people have been touched by Moonfruit SiteMaker and how many customers have been able to create a website beyond their expectations using our award winning website builder. But enough about us, this is about you. You're the ones building the sites, so we wanted to give something back, like a Xmas bonus...

We've decided to run a competition in the run up to reaching 2,000,000 websites with a prize of £1000 cash (that's roughly $1,500 or €1,250 in your money!). We thought this might be helpful during these crunchy times to pay for or pay off your Xmas shopping (depending on when we pass the 2,000,000 site mark).

The rules are simple: anyone who builds a website on Moonfruit.com between 1 Dec 2008 and the day that we hit the magic 2,000,000 number will be entered into the prize draw. We've had roughly 1.97m websites built as of today, so that's roughly 30,000 people who will be in the draw. We will then select the winner randomly from this group of people once we hit 2,000,000 websites.

But hold your horses, not just any website will do, it has to be a 'real' website. So don't just start creating new trial sites and hope to hit that magic number. If we find a 'welcome to your website' site, you won't win it. By 'real' we mean a website that's actually being created for a specific purpose or is being used for something, and not just created in the hope of winning this competition. It must have real content and a real purpose. And you can't just duplicate an existing site many times over. We'll check!

So there you go. Now's the time to tell your friends to start building websites. Or build that site you've always wanted to build. Or both.

Good luck to you all and be careful you don't spend the money before you get it ;-)

Moonfruit Resellers - a case study

Joe — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 13:03:00 +0000

More and more people are making a living out of Moonfruit as professional web designers. Once people discover how easy it is to do, they realise that they can do it, not just for themselves, but for others also. And they can make money ;-). So we thought we'd give you a bit more information on what life is like as a Moonfruit Reseller.

Alistair at SDDesigns joined Moonfruit in June 2006 and has been designing sites ever since with clients in the UK, US and Portugal. He was kind enough to answer a few questions for us...

1. What is your business called and how did you get started?

I actually started web designing as a hobby, my first website was for a very good friend who became a client: www.councillorcreswell.co.uk. As time went on more and more people asked me to design for them, so I started my own small business.

SDDesigns originally started as scrappydoodesigns but as I progressed I realised the name, although catchy, was not really doing my profile any good and I rebranded.

SDDesigns now has clients in the UK, New York and Portugal. I design commercial and political websites, with the newest one being www.kenthouseinc.com

2. What was the challenge you faced in your business that led you to use Moonfruit SiteMaker?

My first ever websites was designed on Microsoft Front Page, but it wasn't flexible and I found myself getting frustrated as I knew how I wanted it to look but couldn't get it right. So I surfed the net and tried several products then came across a new product “Moonfruit”. It was so easy to use that I have used it ever since.

3. Why did you pick Moonfruit over other reseller options?

I picked moonfruit because the look was right, the features and the programming where already done for me. I liked the way I could instantly change something when a client was online, and if you got in trouble, help was only an email away.

4. How has Moonfruit allowed you to achieve your business goals?

Moonfruit has allowed me to achieve a better understanding of the internet, ease in my business and most of all allowed me to enjoy my job.

5. How successful has your business with Moonfruit been?

My business owes its success to Moonfruit, as it has allowed me to achieve the look that my clients require.

6. What advice would you have for someone thinking about setting up a Moonfruit Reseller business?

If you are thinking of setting up a reseller, just do it, you have nothing really to loose. Be honest with your clients at all times, say what you can do, and most of all enjoy doing it. If you don't enjoy designing then it will show.

So there you have it. You could be making a tidy living from Moonfruit. And some of you probably are ;-).

Reseller packs are different from our standard packs that you see on moonfruit.com as those packs are designed for personal and not commercial use. We tend to make the distinction that if you're receiving money to build a website you should really be using one of our Reseller packs. Reseller packs have higher disk and bandwidth limits, plus more free domain names. If you're interested in becoming a reseller, then please contact us. Other types of partnership are also available, see our partners page for details.

What a year!

Walt — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 10:15:00 +0000

2007 was quite a big year for SiteMaker, as far as features, fixes and new widgets flying off the shelves were concerned. The highlights have been:

New features and widgets - Google site search, comments widget, mail to a friend, copy & paste, new forum, themeable technology across several widgets, multiple select, a lot more new media, new advanced (fully configurable) form
Improved features - More disk space, more templates, page permissions and ordering, enhanced tables, rebuilt chat widget, FAQ search, text formatting
SEO - Published HTML now W3C compliant, Google Webmaster tools (Verify), auto-generation of a sitemap file

Below you will find our 2007 release dates with a more detailed list of the main components for each of those releases:

14 February 2007

We added new templates, a downloadable font picker in PDF
We made improvements to the Flash detection system and publishing of alternative content for sites
Improvements to the video player controls and better feed back when video feed fails
FavIcon selection now more flexible
Improved management of page permissions
Popup gallery now closes correctly when changing pages
Enabled jukebox player to continue playing when viewing a slide show
Toolbar login now identifies correct user
Using 'Del' when editing text will only delete the selected text and not the object
Fixed the disappearing ‘Multiple File Upload’ button in Internet Explorer

30 April 2007

Table enhancements - better text selection while editing, plus new 'table' templates including a new folder with useful pre-built tables
Google Site Search: visitors can search your site using Google search (as long as your site has been indexed by Google)
Increased disk space - on all SiteMaker accounts
Positional page adding – permits changing of page order in menu
New FAQs
Member edit bug - members can now user the File Manager correctly
Colour editor - typing in alpha value to HSV tab now updates the selected object
Black Juke Box - now works correctly on the Page Master

17 May 2007

Added Comment widget (with RSS feed)
Added Mail to a Friend widget – so visitors can mail your URL to other people
Membership enabled for all packages
Kewego added to the video widget - now adds videos from www.kewego.com
Site HTML (published automatically behind the site's web pages now W3C compliant - passes W3C compliance, so now much better for SEO
New Press section on moonfruit.com
Widget names can now be changed in the selection label
Video/images sizing bug has been fixed

21 June 2007

Rebuilt the Chat widget - allowing live chats to be hosted on a site
SiteMaker caching - better management of application files to speed up loading of sites
Usability improvements to text boxes
Improved FAQ search
Pages panel with 500+ pages - no longer generates “script running slowly” error
Improved thumbnail quality for uploaded GIFs
Object rotation – angle field now works correctly
Group emails – now sent from site name/site email address not username/user email

21 August 2007

Added Copy & Paste – paste (duplicate) object on same page at new position
Added Copy & Paste - paste object on new page at original position (paste in place)
Added new design templates
Fix for Myspace videos which will now consistently load
Video player will no longer display 'buffering' (and hang) at the end of play back
Audio from video will now stop when navigating to other pages
Fix for double pages loading (stacking on same page) - after using rapid menu clicks
Images can now be loaded directly into widgets e.g. image effects, slide show, polaroid tool
Link buttons now display correct name after link added e.g. site name, email address, page name

24 October 2007

Added new Forum – enabling variable resizing, setting permissions and edit rights for moderators, locking of subjects, searching of all posts, and RSS feeds for all topics
Added new Theme technology allowing easy customisation of widget appearance - applied to new Forum, Comment, Mail to a friend, Chat
Added Multiple select – using click and drag over multiple objects, holding the 'control' or 'shift' keys and clicking on objects to add or remove from selection, or using ‘Select All’ from the ‘Edit’ menu
Enabled Multiple Select so user can drag objects as a group, nudge using the arrow keys, delete, and copy and paste (even between pages!)
Added new media – including: 40 new fonts, 15 new crop tools, 40 new graphic elements, symbols and logos

20th Dec 2007

Added new Advanced Form – themeable, providing customisable fields and boxes, plus required fields and validation, emails sent from the person filling in the form, and data is saved for downloading in CSV
Support for Google Webmaster tools – Google Verify can be enabled
Automatic generation of sitemap file for website – which will be picked up by search engines
Text formatting - justified (proportional spacing) text now supported in standard fonts
File downloads in IE7 no longer show an error message
Updates to moonfruit.com including new design templates, better navigation, quicker access to the Forum and the Moonfruit Blog.

We’ve looked back over the last 12 months and the whole team are very pleased with what we’ve achieved. Obviously, with what we released last year, we set a precedent for delivering a lot of good features, minimising bugs, and improving communications. So, hang on to your hats, 2008 should be even better!

Missing Forum on moonfruit.com - back now

Walt — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 10:54:00 +0000

It's back now! Thanks. --- We are currently doing some work on the Moonfruit Forum so it will be out of action for a short while. This is unrelated to the scheduled maintenance we had earlier this morning. But worry not, we will have a forum back online very soon.

Ooooo the good stuff is nearly there...

Joe — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 16:38:00 +0100

I've been testing the new forum and multiple select features, and I must say, I'm pretty excited. The forum is going to be a really powerful new tool, and will finally allow you to manage large discussions and deep content message boards on SiteMaker. And the multiple select, well it just feels right. Much easier to move things around, nudge them, drag them, delete them and copy and paste them between pages.

Should be with you in 2 weeks or so. Nice.

Gandi.net launches .co.uk extension

Joe — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 11:03:00 +0100

www.gandi.net (Moonfruit's sister company in France) has launched the .co.uk extension, which is great for many Moonfruit customers who come from the UK. And don't worry if you're not from the UK, Gandi offers .com's, .net's, .eu's, and a lot more besides. Because Gandi is Moonfruit's sister company they are used to working with Moonfruit customers and can set up your domain to work with your Moonfruit site quickly and easily. Go on, have a go!

Nice weather we're having!

Joe — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 17:13:00 +0100

I've just got back from holiday in Cornwall. Apparently the warmest Easter weekend since 1985! Well worth it. Been anywhere nice recently?

But enough of my holiday antics, I'm sure you're more interested in the next release. We're dealing with a few unforseen bugs with the FP8 upgrade, so once we have a handle on that, I'll give you an update on when we can expect the comment widget. In the meantime, enjoy the sunshine!

Happy New Year!!

Joe — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 16:56:00 +0000

So it's 2007, and we're all back at work looking forward to the challenges this year will bring. We've got a few things were working on for the first part of 2007, like a new shopping cart, and better domain name integration, but what would you like to see this year? What should 2007 bring for Moonfruit and it's customers. Let us know, and we'll see what we can do.

What is Moonfruit and what do we stand for?

Joe — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 13:26:00 +0000

Moonfruit believes that everyone should be able to participate on the web, being a creator as well as a consumer. The original vision for the company when it was founded back in 1999 was to allow people to 'share their passions online'. A lot has happened since then, but this is still key to our vision. We aim to remove the barriers to technology and enable people to achieve results beyond their expectations quickly and easily.

Our tools are nothing without the customers who use them, and we want to recommit to this vision and work with you so that we continue to build the tools for the future.

It's been a tough ride since 1999, surviving the dotcom crash and all that went with it, and it hasn't always been easy to stick to that vision. But much has changed in this last year and we're ready to go again.

This new site is part of that process and contains a number of improvements for you. This blog will be our communication channel with you and through it we want to update you on what we're doing, and take your views on what we should be doing next.

We've also completed and are working on a number of new features which we've heard from you are important for your sites, and fixed a number of outstanding bugs that have been problems in the past. These include;

New features

Support for Google AdSense
Enabled back button
Table widget
Video player
Video upload and management
Custom colour saving
Google search widget

Fixes/enhancements

Long link support
PayPal link editing/shopping cart
Transparency bug fix - stops objects fading!

What we're working on

Full site statistics
Improved ecommerce features

So sit back and enjoy the ride. We're ready to help you create something extraordinary and we hope you'll support us in that vision.

What's new at Moonfruit?

Joe — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 13:24:00 +0000

At the end of last year, the management team of Moonfruit and a partner in France set up a new company with the aim of creating a new European internet group. This put Moonfruit in the UK together with Gandi in France (www.gandi.net - a top seller of domain names in France with over 500,000 domains) and created the opportunity to produce something larger than either of them.

Gandi was founded in 1999 and rapidly became the No 1 domain seller in France because of its commitment to strong internet ethics, always putting the customer and the rights of the customer first. This made it unique as an ethical and non-marketing led domain name company, and is still what drives it today. (Learn more about Gandi at www.gandi.net and www.gandibar.net)

We felt this was a great fit with Moonfruit who had a strong vision for enabling people to participate and publish on the internet regardless of their skills and experience.

Since that time both companies have been working hard to make this vision a reality. Gandi has relaunched its services and website, and is rolling out new domain extensions and multiple currency support. Moonfruit has redeveloped a core part of its software to support multiple languages, and will launch the French version in the weeks to come.

With both businesses we aim to offer a home on the internet (your domain name), as well as the means to build your house (SiteMaker), and this is only the beginning.

So it's been a busy year for us, but most of the change is now behind us, and we can concentrate on the future. We hope you'll enjoy being a part of that with us.