Moonfruit Lounge

New release - May 1st 2008

Joe — Thu, 01 May 2008 11:43:00 +0100

It's release time again and this one is a biggy! Lots of things we've been waiting to get out for for a very long time, with something for everyone. Get ready for some excitement, quiet in the back row please, here it comes...

Domain name module

Register and manage domain names through Moonfruit.com (good prices!)
Free domain name bundled with SiteMaker Standard, Plus and Max accounts
Existing subscribers will be credited with a domain voucher on their next payment! (see below for more details)
Transfer to Moonfruit and email/webmail to follow in the next release

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

So there you go, a whole heap of stuff. That'll keep you busy for a while! Let us know if you find any problems and we'll get back to the grindstone to work on some more things for the months to come. Enjoy!

Domain vouchers for existing customers
We often get some grief for offering deals to new customers but not existing customers, so when it comes to the new domain offer we wanted to make sure that everyone on a qualifying pack got it, both new and old.

For new customers and existing monthly customers, it's quite simple: you get your domain voucher on your next payment, which for all existing monthly customers should be within the next month. You'll then get your next one (1 per year) on the anniversary of this first voucher being issued.

For existing annual customers, your next payment could be sometime away, so instead we will credit you with your domain voucher in June 2008. We're waiting 1 month to do this so that we can manage the flow of vouchers to existing customers, so apologies for the delay, but you will get your voucher.

If you are an existing customer and you upgrade you will be credited with any additional voucher due at the time of the upgrade.

Successful Completion of Scheduled Downtime

Walt — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 12:01:00 +0100

Our scheduled down time was completed successfully at 11:20 AM BST (GMT+1) following 50 minutes of programmed maintenance work (downtime commenced at 10:30 AM BST). All systems are fully functional.

We thank you for your patience.

Notification of Planned System Downtime

Walt — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 11:59:00 +0100

Time: Thursday, 17th April 2008 10 AM BST (GMT+1)

Duration: 1 hour

We will be performing an upgrade to our database layer. During this upgrade, sites will be unavailable for editing or viewing. Visitors will see a notice informing them the site is down for maintenance with the expected return time. Normal service should resume by 11 AM.

We apologise for any inconvenience.

Bug fixes and site updates - 2 April 2008

Walt — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:55:00 +0100

We were worried that if we released bug fixes yesterday, no one would believe us (being April Fool's day). So we held off a day, did some more testing and felt happier getting them out today. Some of you may think we play computer games for 3 weeks and then have a mad rush of development over the last week to get work completed. If only! We've actually been busy fixing some bugs, while work continues on some big ticket items.

Today we released these changes to correct some annoying bugs and added a useful guide for those interested in Search Engines:

Blurry thumbnails for the pop-up gallery (as well as slide show and image effects) have now been fixed
Editor (File Manager and other panels) which sometimes hid in the top-left corner and wouldn't budge should be back to normal
Users can now set up Google Analytics with the new tracking code - the 'ga.js' tracking code - although either will work fine
We've finally added the new SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) guide to the moonfruit.com site. You can find it on the Guides page and it provides useful details on getting your site listed, site rankings, links and more.

That's it for the moment.

Changes to the way HTML is generated

Dan — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 18:55:00 +0000

Hi, Dan here, SiteMaker's HTML developer guy. I've been working to make the HTML that we output a little more user and search engine friendly. As you may or may not know, we generate an HTML version of your site mainly for SEO reasons but also as an alternative for people who don't have Flash or are using a non-visual web browser. If you wanna know exactly what I've been up to, then read on...

Previously we'd been attempting to make a visually equivalent page with varying degrees of success...so we've decided to switch focus to a content based approach. What does that mean? Well, the idea is that the most important thing on your website is the content - the text and pictures -and I've been focusing on making the HTML site more readable when you don't have flash (maybe you're browsing on your iPhone for example). There's a fair distance to go but here are the changes that have gone out in this release:

H1 tag - The first Title text box on a page is now rendered as an H1 tag. The idea here is that you want to promote the content of each page and I'm making a best guess that the first Title text box on a page is going to be the page's title. Title text boxes on the Page Master are still rendered as h2s. The idea here is to focus on the unique content on each page.

H3 tags - Lots of you seem to be using normal text boxes using bold text as smaller headings. If you've got a text box that only has bold text in it and it's less than 120 characters long then it'll be converted to an H3.

No more boxes around text - The HTML now ignores text box dimensions. I found that a lot of the time the text rendered in the HTML didn't fit inside smaller sized boxes and you ended up with an HTML site covered in scroll bars.

New "View HTML Version" on the Page Settings panel - If you click this now you'll get a view of the site as it appears to people without Flash (minus the graphic that shouts INSTALL FLASH!).

Continuing the work on the HTML version of the site I'm currently looking into making the text render in the right order if it's laid out in more than one column (you know, like a sidebar or something similar). Feedback as always is welcome, after all, this is something of a work in progress.

New Release - 25 March 2008

Walt — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 17:00:00 +0000

Apparently, spring arrived last week, but with the Arctic weather that hit the UK over the weekend you'd be forgiven for thinking we'd returned to mid-winter. But this week does mark the arrival of our 2nd release for the year with some goodies and some bug fixes. We continue to finish and refine two larger projects - domain name registrations and a new File Manager - and these will be launched very soon. But rather than keep you waiting we wanted to give you a few new features to play with while we polish the other features and we wait for the real spring to arrive.

So what's on offer this month? You'll find details below:

New Features

'Viewport' added to make editing and managing files easier
Improvements to W3C compliance and some tidy up
HTML version of page now opens in new window
Making Title tags more prominent in the HTML
'Show Homes' page and links added to moonfruit.com
Addition of 10 new templates
New SEO guide added to the moonfruit.com portal
Improvements to multiple selection with changes to using the Control or Shift keys
Ctrl key required for 'logout' from widgets when editing

Bug fixes

Making the File Manager more context sensitive when adding images, audio and video
Resetting the Video widget will now hide the video provider label

Viewport

Editing your pages, especially long ones just got a whole lot easier. Viewport is the name we've given to a great new feature that in simple terms enables the Editor panel to follow you around your page. In the past editing long pages meant dragging the Editor panel down the page or scrolling back up the page to find it. But not any more. Once you open a long or wide page for editing you only need click on an object and the Editor will appear on the border of the visible page.

Changing pages no longer sends the editor back to the top right hand corner of the new page, it will maintain its previous position, unless the view changes but at the very least it will stay visible. And opening up the File Manager will respect the same conditions by opening up within the visible browser - if opened up by the Editor's mini menu.

These improvements also mean that any media being added to the page will also remain within the visible browser so that you will never lose, for example, images you've just added to a page.

HTML Enhancements

One of our commitments has been to improve how we publish your sites. With this release we have changed our focus slightly by tweaking and refining how we generate HTML from your site content so that it meets with W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) compliance. We've also refined our software so that if you wish to use the Generate HTML button to view the HTML version of a page on your site, it will now open in new window, making 'View source' a little easier. The other big improvement has been to Title tags in HTML. We've applied rules so that the first Title text box renders as an H1 tag in the HTML with all other Title text boxes generating a H2 tag. The H3 tag will be applied (after some rules) to text that has been set as bold. But a more complete explanation will be published later in the week by one of our team members.

Editing Improvements

To make editing your site just a little bit safer we have now applied a new rule to the 'Log in/Log out' widget. If you added one of these to your page you must use the 'Ctrl' key to logout when in the edit environment. This is to avoid accidentally clicking this button to test it, causing you to log out and lose your latest changes. This makes the 'Log out' widget like any other link button.

Multiple selection received some attention too. We updated the keys used to mark multiple selection on your pages. You can use either Control or Shift - but not both, which still allows Ctrl-Shift-D to be used for duplicating content.

Getting the most out of your site

We often get questions from users about why their site isn't appearing in web searches, or why their search rankings are poor. We've now compiled Joe's articles on this into a PDF and will be adding this to the moonfruit.com portal shortly. This should give novice users a good introduction to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and how to apply it to their web sites.

New Templates and Show Homes

Every release we try and add a few new templates or designs and this release is no exception. We've added 10 new design templates to the Personal and Professional sets, so once you've decided the Site Type you now have 10 new designs on offer.

The Show Homes sites we created to publicise our great variety of media, and some useful widgets, received a lot of interest. So, to simplify the access to these sites to compare media or see what's on offer, we added some links to the moonfruit.com portal. Just visit the 'Sites' menu on moonfruit.com and then follow the Show Homes link.

Bug Fixes

Some of our widgets had their own eccentric behaviours when it came to adding media using the File Manager. We have made a big step forward in making this behaviour closer to normal so this is less a bug fix than an improvement. For example, in the past adding an images to your Pop-up Gallery or the Slide Show, would have meant using the tool itself to add an image as using the File Manager would have added an image to your page and not into the widget. This has now been changed, so that the File Manager will know you are editing a specific widget and add your media to it and not the page. This newly 'context-sensitive' behaviour means you can now add audio, image and video files to the appropriate widget directly from the File Manager.

We also tidied up the Video widget so that the previous video feed provider label was removed when the player was reset to play your own video. Please note: If you replace an externally fed video with another (externally fed e.g. Youtube, Google etc) then we will display their label as a professional courtesy.

Coming soon (Two big projects that are very close to completion)

Domain names (finally!)
File Manager changes

New showhomes sites

Joe — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 14:11:00 +0000

Because our tool can be used in so many ways, the choices can often be mind-boggling. Each tool has a number of different ways that it can be customised to make it look the way you want and do the things you do, but sometimes you don't know what you want until you see it! So that's why we present to you the show homes. Here you'll find real examples of how tools can be used to stimulate your creative imagination...

The showhomes section will be coming soon to Moonfruit.com, but we wanted to give you a sneak preview of what kinds of things will be on there. So here are some of the sites that we have built.

Image tools - http://imagetoolsshowhome.moonfruit.com

The image tools show home deals with the core image features within SiteMaker which include; crop tools, pop-up galleries and the slide show. This site shows you a range of existing tools and how to change their presentation to meet particular needs, e.g. as a product catalogue, or animated image sequence. Have a look.

Clipart - http://clipartshowhome.moonfruit.com/

There's loads of clipart available to use within SiteMaker, but it's not always easy to see it bit by bit in the File Manager. So here is a complete list of what is available split between graphic elements, image cut-outs, and maps & wallpapers.

Gradient effects - http://gradientseffectsshowhome.moonfruit.com/

Gradient effects are one of those things that can be used to create a vibrant design in your site, but it's not always obvious which ones to use and how to use them. This site gives you some ideas.

Themeable widgets - http://themeablewidgetshowhome.moonfruit.com/

The new range of widgets (chat, forum, form, mail to a friend, comments) are all themeable, which means you can change the button styles and colours quickly and easily. Here are some examples of how they could look.

Video widgets - http://videowidgetshowhome.moonfruit.com/

Video widgets can be customised to look a number of different ways without or without their controls visible. This site gives you a few ideas of how you can change the way they look to fit with your site.

Let us know what you think and enjoy!!

New Release - 8 Feb 2008

Joe — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 11:51:00 +0000

It's the first release of the year! Hurray! And hopefully a good one too. We've got a few big changes to site navigation, some edit improvements and some bug fixes/enhancements. Details below.

So the new features are:

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

Bug fixes;

Kewego videos work again
Thumbnail generation improved for galleries

Updating page URLs and bookmarking

When you navigate your site, the URL (web address) in the browser will now update to show the address of the page you are on. This means you can now bookmark any page in your site, or email a link to someone so they can jump straight to a page. We published a whole article on this last month, so full details are here.

Undo/redo (for moves and scales)

We've now introduced undo and redo functions for certain edit features in your site. This means that whenever you move or scale objects (either single objects or in multiple selection) you can now undo/redo those changes. This is particularly useful for when you move something by accident. The current undo will not undo certain other actions, e.g. object deletion, text edits or colour changes, but we may be able to introduce some of these features in the future. This has been a big project and there is a lot happening under the hood, so to speak, even if with just moving or resizing objects. So at times it may take a few clicks for you to see visible undo or redo actions occurring. Have a play and let us know what you think, we think it will be a useful new addition!

SEO improvements (page title changes)

Just to prove we do actually listen, we got lots of feedback that the 'Page title' field that we set in the HTML for your site was too short at 50 characters, so we've increased the amount of text available to 120 characters. Apparently Google will only use the first 66 characters of the page title in its indexing, but Yahoo will use up to 120. So the thing to do is write a single title that has a useful message/keywords in the first 66 characters and further detail up to the 120 limit.

Forum improvements

We've made a few minor changes to the forum. These are the introduction of 'move topic' which means you can now move topics to other subjects if they are posted incorrectly. And navigation improvements which allow you to jump to the first/last post of a topic. We've also fixed a couple of bugs, for example you couldn't post a reply if you found a topic via the search function and when you did reply to post you got returned to the first page.

Bug fixes

Firstly, Kewego videos should now work again following a change to the way that they posted the video source. And secondly, we have changed the way that thumbnails are produced which should improve the quality of thumbnails in the galleries. Please note that for the thumbnails to improve you will need to (delete and then) re-upload your images, e.g. the current thumbnail will not change, only new ones will use the new conversion process.

We also updated the robots.txt file so that customers using Google Verify should no longer see the '403 - Forbidden' error message, although please bear in mind this may take Google from a few days to a few weeks to re index your site and pick up the change.

And that's about it for you.

Coming soon

Domain names (finally!)
File manager changes

Resolved: service outage: 08.10 GMT 25 Jan 2008

Joe — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 08:32:00 +0000

All services should be back to normal from 10.15 GMT. We will provide further information on the cause of the outage once or network provider makes it available to us. Apologies for this service disruption.

SiteMaker services are currently due to a network outage at our datacentre affecting not just SiteMaker. Our network providers engineers are working to resolve the issue as soon as possible. We will provide updates as soon as we have them.

Updating page URLs and bookmarking

Joe — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 15:44:00 +0000

New changes due out in Feb will make navigating around your site more intuitive and allow your customers to bookmark specific pages. For more details read on.

What are we changing?

Every page in your website e.g. yoursite.moonfruit.com, has its own URL (internet address), which is yoursite.moonfruit.com/yourpage. However when people navigate around your site the URL doesn't update. A side effect of this is that you cannot bookmark a particular page as the address bar always shows the URL that you or your customers first arrived at. Well, all that is about to change.

In February we will introduce a change that will update the URL whenever you change pages. However, it will do this without refreshing the page, so music will continue playing and there will be no interruption to content. Because every page will now update the URL in the address bar, your visitors will have a much better idea of where they are as they navigate through your site. They will also be able to bookmark a specific page in the normal way, which means having saved that page in their ‘Favorites’ they will be able to return directly to the correct point in your site. It will also mean they can email these page links to other people by cutting and pasting from the address bar.

It has only become possible to do this since we increased the minimum requirements for SiteMaker to Flash 8. This is partly why we pushed that change through a few months ago and why we are completing this work now.

So what will it look like for you?

Well, if you have a site, e.g. www.joeslondontaxis.com, and you click on the Taxi Booking page, the URL will update to:

www.joeslondontaxis.com/#/taxibooking/4521371523

which is the address of that page. If you then click on Airport Taxi Booking in the menu the URL will update to:

www.joeslondontaxis.com/#/airporttaxibooking/4521387384

which is the address of that page. Your visitors will be able to go 'forward' and 'back' in the browser history as normal (and the URL will keep correctly updating), and they will be able to bookmark those pages too.

If you're wondering why your page addresses have a number after them, this is the unique ID for that page. Because we permit you to have two different pages in your site with the same name, we append the page name with the unique ID to be sure that we serve up the right page. This is similar to the way many large sites work, e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7178288.stm from the BBC.

As for the # character, well that's just the character we use to let the Flash site know which page it should be looking at, and to tell the browser not to refresh the page.

So there you have it! An exciting new change to improve the navigation and bookmarking of your site. Coming soon to a Moonfruit site near you...

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!

Sitemaps and Google Verify

Walt — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 12:16:00 +0000

The wait is over. We took on board the number of requests for these two tools and decided you'd waited long enough. All users can now publish sitemaps, as well as Verify their websites.

For details on how to check for the sitemap and how to add Google Verify, read on...

Verify To add Google Verify to your site, please just follow the simple instructions below:

Log in to your website
Select “Admin” on the toolbar
Visit the “Site Information” tab
Click on the “Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools” button
On the bottom of the Webmaster Tools panel click “Get your Google ID”
Google should open in a new window and ask you to sign in
You’ll be taken to the Google "Dashboard"
Add your website address in blank field and click "Add Site"
Look for the "Next step" box and select, "Verify Site"
Go to the "Verification Method" drop down and select "Add a meta tag"
Copy the code string e.g.: <meta name="verify-v1" content="UqbdIVXyU8m8PIvMSJLj+W6bf5Sa4An1CZcxazTgafs=" />
Return to your website and paste the code string into the blank field in the "Webmaster Tools" panel
Click "OK"
Click "OK" on "Admin" panel
Your site will now have the Google Verification code added to the HTML

N.B. The code string given above (<meta name="verify-v1" content="UqbdIVXyU8m8PIvMSJLj+W6bf5Sa4An1CZcxazTgafs=" />) is an example, please do not use this, it won't work! You must register with Google and request your own.

Sitemap We automatically generate an XML file which search engines will index when ever they visit your site. We automatically publish all pages visible in the menu and withhold those that are hidden. If you wish hidden pages to be published you will need to visit the hidden page, click on "Edit" and then go to "Page Settings". You can then select the check box for "Include this page in my Site Map".

To see your site map, you only need to add "/sitemap.xml" to the end of your website address (or URL) in the web browser address bar e.g. www.mysitename.com/sitemap.xml

If you see the message: "This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.", don't panic! This is being generated by the browser (most likely Firefox) and relates to 'how' the information is being displayed in your browser and does not affect what the search engines 'see'.

UPDATE (18/01/08):

For those of you checking site verification you will probably encounter some "403 (Forbidden)" errors. They will appear in list with entries similar to the two below:

(http://www.mysite.com/_app/8296/partner/moonfruit/modules/) 403 (Forbidden) _?_
(http://www.mysite.com/_app/8296/resources/) 403 (Forbidden) _?_

These are folders that the the web crawlers (or robots) should not be accessing as they contain and relate to software that runs your site and they do not contain any of your site content.

Our mistake has been to omit an 'exclude' comment telling robots not to look in these directories, which have restricted access anyway. So the web crawlers attempt to read these directories, are not permitted and subsequently generate a 'Forbidden' error.

This bug will be fixed very soon. We will simply request that the web crawlers do not check those directories and this will mean errors will not be generated.

These errors will have no impact on the indexing of your site or your page rankings!

UPDATE (08/02/08):

We have now modified the 'robots.txt' file to stop the web crawlers reading our application directories and throwing up 'errors'. However, now that we have blocked these directories you will probably see a report from Google that says: "URL restricted by robots.txt " and listing the same '.../_app/...' directories (as mentioned above). Google themselves recognise that some directories can be restricted for a logical reason and then simply continue crawling your site for valid content and links.

Just to reiterate, seeing a 'restricted' message is not a cause for alarm and this will not affect your site being indexed or impact your page rankings.

New Release - 20th Dec 2007

Joe — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 11:53:00 +0000

Ho ho ho. T'was the week before Christmas and all through the office not a developer was moving, not even those usually most active. Probably tired, but that's another story.

Anyway, it's Christmas present time! That's right, SiteMaker Claus has his goody bag stuffed full of little software updates for all the good boys and girls (and even those who haven't been so good). So here's the list in full...

New features

Form 2 - the form strikes back
Support for Google Webmaster tools
Automatic generation of Sitemaps
Text formatting - justified text supported in standard fonts
Updates to moonfruit.com including new design templates

Bug fixes

File downloads in IE7 no longer show an error message

That's the summary, but here's the detail for each of the new features including some guidance on how to use them.

Form 2
The new form widget can be found in the 'Forms' folder in the File Manager (Advanced Form). There's just one for now, but we'll add some new pre-configured versions in the New Year. The new form has a lot of new features which include:

Support for drop down boxes, list boxes, radio buttons, check boxes
Required fields - set fields to be compulsory and validate for 'email', 'numbers', or 'text only'
Emails now come from the person filling in the form - not Sitemaker - we thought you'd like that one ;-)
Forms are themeable and scalable just like the other new widgets
Data submitted via the form is not only emailed, but also saved in a data store (CSV file) which you can download from your site (in the Edit panel), so you'll never lose data to junk filters again!
All text on the form is now customisable, including buttons, titles, success and error messages

NB. We haven't added file attachments in this release, but hope to do it in the future.

Support for Google Webmaster tools
We heard many requests from our customers to support site validation for Google Webmaster Tools. If you sign up for Google Webmaster Tools, you can now paste the validation tag they give you into the 'Site Information' panel which will add it to your site HTML and allow you to be validated. For more information on Google Webmaster Tools see their pages on it.

Sitemaps
Slightly related to Webmaster tools, sitemaps are a list of all visible pages in your website. They are a tool to help search engines correctly index your site. We now generate one automatically for your site. Any page that is in your menu is automatically included in the sitemap and for pages that are not, you can add them in manually using a check box on the 'Page Settings' panel. You don't need to do anything to get the benefit of a sitemap, as search engines look for them anyway, but you can download it if you like at: yoursite.moonfruit.com/sitemap.xml.

Justified text
Not a biggy but still important, we've added justified text formatting to standard text boxes. This means you can now left align, right align, centre or justify your text boxes as you like. We hope to add this to the graphic fonts in the New Year.

Updates to moonfruit.com
We thought moonfruit.com could do with a tidy and reorganisation for 2008, so here it is. We've added a new community section to draw more attention to the great sites and users that we have on moonfruit. Content from the forum and blog are also displayed directly on the moonfruit homepage along with a feed displaying some of your finest sites. And finally, we've added some new design templates and created some new categories including one for those templates made and submitted by our customers.

And that's your lot. Have a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and we'll be back with some more changes in 2008. Ho ho ho.

SiteMaker and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - Part VI - Return of the Taxi

Walt — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 13:35:00 +0000

If you thought we'd let Joe's Taxis gather dust in West London you were wrong. Far from being abandoned to the internet ether we've kept tabs on how the 'mythical' west London taxi business was doing six months down the line, after being set up by Joe. As far as rankings go, the two domain names are doing very nicely thank you.

For an update on how Joe's London Taxis and West London Taxis have changed in their rankings with the major search engines, read on.

In Joe's SEO article (SEO III) on Friday, March 16 2007 he had began his submissions process to Google, Yahoo and MSN. By Tuesday, March 27 2007, Joe's sites had found their mark with at least two of the major search engines. And by June his site had managed some success (check out his last article, "SEO V"):

June 12

"West London Taxi" - number 7, "Joes London Taxis" - number 1 (Google.com)
"West London Taxi" - number 2, "Joes London Taxis" - number 1 (Yahoo.com)
"West London Taxi" - number 1, "Joes London Taxis" - number 1 (msn.com)

Yesterday, we used the same set of keywords - "west london taxi" and "joes london taxis" - and we got the following results:

December 12

"West London Taxi" - number 1, "Joes London Taxis" - number 1 (Google.com)
"West London Taxi" - number 1, "Joes London Taxis" - number 1 (Yahoo.com)
"West London Taxi" - number 6, "Joes London Taxis" - number 1 (msn.com)

So, what have we done? Well, to be honest, nothing. But this does go to show you that with some solid groundwork in the early stages of your journey to the dark side of SEO you can actually get your site or sites into a very good position on the page rankings of the major search engines. However, if you resubmit your domain name (URL), keep your content fresh and get some incoming links from popular sites then you can ensure your site has a much better chance of achieving and maintaining a top ranking.

A reminder

Just to highlight the steps Joe took all those months ago, remember that search engines do look for consistency and relevancy in a number of different areas of your in-page content and referral links. These include:

The URL (or address) of your site (or specific pages on your site), e.g. www.joeslondontaxis.com, or www.joeslondontaxis.com/taxibooking, etc.
Your site name or title (and page titles) being published in the HTML, e.g. "London taxi company", or "London taxi bookings page"
Your site and page keywords meta data published in the HTML, e.g. "London taxis, London taxi, Joes taxis, West London taxi, etc."
Your site and page description meta data published in the HTML, e.g. "London taxi company provides taxi services..."
Your page content, e.g. the text that is on your page and relevant to your site name, keywords and description
Links on your page, including the anchor text, e.g. the text on which the link is set, e.g. "Book a west London taxi" links to http://www.joeslondontaxis.com/taxibooking
Images on your page, including the name of the image file (or Alt text)
Referral links to your site or specific pages on your site, e.g. a link on another site (incoming links) referring to your site

Points 1-7 are easily within your control as they all relate to the contents of your site and all can be easily managed through your SiteMaker site. Point 8 requires linking to your site from other external sites, which is less easy to achieve, though there are a number of ways in which you can go about doing this.

If you haven't yet had a read of Joe's articles and you are interested in getting your site listed or improving the rankings of your site, then the easiest way to find the articles is just enter "SEO" in the Moonfruit Lounge search.

Finally

Just remember, as Joe has already mentioned, SEO isn't everything. It certainly plays a big part in marketing your website but traditional off-line publishing methods still play a crucial part in the overall marketing strategy of any site. Good luck, persist with your search engine optimisation, and be patient. It doesn't happen overnight but if you follow our guidelines it will happen.

More Articles about SEO

SiteMaker and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - Part I (In the beginning - the 1st in this series by Joe)

SiteMaker, Flash and SEO (Why SiteMaker works with SEO)

Why am I (or my visitors) seeing a text only version of my site?

Walt — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 13:14:00 +0000

This problem is being encountered for users with Internet Explorer 6.

To enable the SiteMaker application and the web pages to load quicker we made changes to some code (JavaScript) which we released recently.

We use JavaScript to detect what version of Flash Player you have installed on your system amongst other things and we upgraded the JavaScript file and the loading process for this file to provide several improvements. Unfortunately, IE6 isn't exactly standards compliant so our mission to improve efficiency appears to have upset the IE6 web browser.

IE7, Firefox, Safari etc have no issues with these improvements.

Web browsers will store or cache commonly visited pages and files (like JavaScript) to make web browsing more efficient. The older JavaSript file should have been replaced by the newer version, but due to a deficiency in IE6 the older version was not over-written in some cases. In effect, IE6 thinks there is no Flash Player installed and therefore displays the text only version of your site.

Fixing this is simple. All you need to do is to delete your 'temporary Internet files', also known as 'clearing your cache', which will delete the older JavaScript file and force the browser to request the latest version. To do this, go to the IE6 toolbar:

Open the Tools menu
Select Internet Options
If the General tab is not selected, select it
Select Delete Files in the Temporary Internet Files section
Choose OK
Close and re-open your web browser

The other option is to upgrade to IE7 which offers tabbed browsing, more options and a more 'robust' version of web browser. You can upgrade to IE7 by visiting the Microsoft website.

Should you need to upgrade Flash, our minimum requirement is now Flash Player 8 and you can download the latest Flash version from the Adobe website.

My music is playing back too fast - it sounds like Chipmunks!

Walt — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 17:00:00 +0000

Do the MP3s on your site sounding like Chip and Dale (the chipmunks) are doing covers of your favourite songs? The reason is down to how you initially encoded your songs. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen.

Files encoded using 'standard' MP3 format at CONSTANT bit rate will normally play without issue, provided the sample rate is a multiple of 44.1kHz - other 'interpolating' sample rates cause Flash Player to speed up the playback.

So, how do you fix this problem? You have two choices...

IMPORTANT Update 21 Dec 07: Especially if your page lengths remain constant throughout your site in IE7: Please just go to Adobe and download the latest Flash player and this should fix get the chipmunks out of your site and give you variable page lengths back. If you downloaded the beta version (in article below) you will find a fix with instructions in comment #2 beneath this post.

You can fix it now: Sample rates of 96000, 44100, 22050 and 11025 samples/second at 8, 16 and 32 bit depth will all work fine. So if you wish to remove the chipmunks from your site you will have to re-encode the offending files using the sample rates given above with one of the constant bit rates. If you are interested there is more information about this bug available.

Adobe will fix it later: This bug will be fixed soon by the release of Flash Player Update 3 which is currently at the Beta 2 stage which will play back any MP3 sampling rate. So, no more chipmunks. Ever. But this will require all your visitors to have downloaded the soon to be released Flash update for this to work, i.e. your visitors must have the update to hear your music correctly.

So you have an option. You can re-encode your music and remove the chipmunks now, or you can wait for the fix to hit the masses.

Google Webmaster Tools - the lowdown

Walt — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 11:45:00 +0000

Firstly, sorry for going quiet on you in the forum with regards to some requests. The truth is we have been listening but we've been busy over the last few weeks discussing what we could offer, how it would be presented and when we would find time to develop it. So in answer to your many questions about Google Webmaster tools on Moonfruit, please read on...

From what we hear (on the forum) the main requests are for Google Verify and Google Sitemaps. Let's look at them one at a time.

Google Verify Just to be clear, site verification is a process that Google uses to ensure that only site owners can see detailed diagnostics, statistics and other information. It is worth also noting that Verification doesn't affect Page Rank or improve your site's performance in Google's search results. This is from the horse's mouth.

What we currently offer: Google Analytics, which is the statistics element you would be using to monitor your site stats once verification is enabled. Analytics allows you to find out where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site.

What we are looking to implement: We've already started looking at how we can enable Verify on users' sites. Inserting the meta tag which Google provide may be the best solution for us and the quickest for you. We're looking at doing this at the moment, so if you're lucky you may find it in your Xmas stockings.

Google SiteMaps When it comes to Sitemaps you have a choice of generating different types of files which can then be submitted or uploaded to Google or Yahoo or having some code included in your site which is read by the various search engines. Simply put, a sitemap using the Sitemap Protocol is an XML file that lists URLs (unique pages) for a site. It also permits the inclusion of additional information about each URL (when it was last updated; how often it changes; how important it is in relation to other URLs in your site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

What we currently do: We render all the content (publicly available on your site) into the HTML for each page so that they can be read by the search engines along with page title, links, meta keywords and meta description for those pages.

What we are looking to implement: We are currently working on using the Sitemap Protocol to publish a sitemap for each site so that every page URL (that you wish displayed) is listed for not just Google to crawl and index, but Yahoo and any other search engine that will read this widely accepted protocol.

This is being worked on at present although we make no promises about Xmas stockings. But, you never know!

Where's my email? The truth about forms

Walt — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 10:44:00 +0000

We often have customers ask us why emails that are sent from forms on their site take so long to arrive or why they just don't arrive at all? Slow or lost emails isn't a common event but the cause of this problem usually is. For more details read on...

Common Cause

The most common cause of emails not being delivered to a site owner or site leader's inbox is the email filter. This could either be a junk or spam filter.

When a visitor completes a form on your site and submits it, an email is generated to you (the site leader) from mailings@sitemakerlive.com. Our mail server sends the email to the nominated email address immediately and once it leaves our servers we lose all control over what path it takes and whether or not it gets delivered. If the email client - the package or application you use to view, send and manage your emails - has strict filters then some 'safe' emails may never reach your inbox.

One way of ensuring your emails from 'sitemakerlive.com' arrive in your inbox is to check your spam and junk mail folders and if you find any emails from us just highlight or select them and mark them as 'not junk' or 'not spam'. The other useful way of ensuring that your emails arrive is to add 'sitemakerlive.com' to your list of safe domains.

We have also found that having your own email domain and forwarding your emails can have its problems also. Using an email address with your domain name - when you buy your own website domain name you may get email addresses as well - on your forms will mean mail is normally sent to your domain name provider where it will then be forwarded (by them) to your own private email account. Occasionally, the domain name providers hold the emails, scan them for viruses, or for phrases and words linked to spam email and then will either delete them if they think they pose a risk or pass them on. This presents two problems: 1) they decide if incoming emails are spam, not you and 2) your emails may be held in a queue for an undefined length of time. So the forwarding of emails could result in you either not getting your emails or getting them hours or days later.

How to test?

Create a hidden page on your site and add a couple of forms to the page. Set one up to go direct to your own private email address and set the other (if you have your own email domain) to use your domain email address. Save the page and then just send two messages, one from each form.

Next, just check how long it takes for those two emails to arrive in your private inbox (if you have forwarded the latter of the two email addresses). If problems exist with you receiving your forwarded email then you will need to speak to your domain name provider and check why emails from 'sitemakerlive.com' are either being delayed or not forwarded. Usually, advising them that emails from our domain are safe is enough to fix the problem.

The best advice is just test your emails on a regular basis to ensure that your service is working correctly.

Also, in the next release (version) of the Form, we will also be saving all the data collected (from the submitted email) to a file that you can download from your site, so you'll never have to worry about losing responses again!

Happy emailing!

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.

Essential Maintenance at 9:27 Thursday 22 Nov.

Walt — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 09:25:00 +0000

As already highlighted in our Message of the Day to all users (all site leaders will see this when logging in), our services have been taken down briefly for essential maintenance. This will be a brief period of downtime and should take no longer than 10-15 min.

The site is back up and running (9:45). If you continue to see a maintenance page then your browser will have stored a copy of that page and you will need to clear your cache (or Temporary Internet Files). Please use the Help in your web browser to find out how to clear your cache or temporary Internet files.

We thank you for your patience and understanding.