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!

New release - 18th Dec 2008

Joe — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:40:00 +0000

So this is Christmas (laaa, laaa, laaa, laaa), and what have we learned (laaa, laaa, laaa, laaa), another year older (laaa, laaa, laaa, laaa), etc. In fact speaking of another year older, as 2009 approaches we'll be entering our 10th year of moonfruiting, so not bad going for the old website builder.

Anyway, you don't want to hear about that, you're interested in Santa's Goodie bag, or should I say Google bag...

Keeping up the theme of releasing Google based widgets at Xmas (see last year) we thought we'd add the much requested Google maps feature to SiteMaker so that you can help your customers find you - if you want them to find you ;-)

Google Maps Integration

Add a Google maps interface directly into your site
Set a location beacon to show your exact location on the map
Allow your customers to manipulate the map (zoom/drag) to help them get their bearings
It's in the 'functional' folder called 'google map'

Improved YouTube Video Feed

We have also updated our video player to use YouTube’s very own video API to ensure reliability. This will mean that if YouTube change how they serve videos, you don’t have to worry about your video failing, we will pick up any changes and ensure the video feed is maintained.

However, please be aware that if the video owner has set or marked the video as "private" or "embed only", the video will not be available via our player.

Some other stuff

4 new templates to choose from
File manager reorganisation, including up to date 'all' folders to help you find things more easily

And...that's it. Not quite the usual Xmas bonanza granted, but we've been working on several big pieces of new functionality and haven't been able to complete them in time to get them to Santa.

We tried outsourcing some of our development to Santa's Elves to speed things up, but the economy at the North Pole is still largely based on traditional manufacturing and hasn't yet made the transition to a service sector based economy with strong conceptual software skills, so that didn't work out so well. On the plus side they did make us a nice set of toy soldiers.

So you'll have to accept an IOU from us, for early next year, for the membership and e-Commerce features. But to give you a little sneak preview, I've got a couple of screenshots of the work in progress.

The enhanced membership features will arrive first. We're building them first as a platform the the e-Commerce improvements, e.g. to run a good shop, you want your customers to be able to create user accounts and we found our current membership tools a bit lacking. So the new ones will make it easier to create and manage members, set permissions for pages (e.g. members only), and communicate with those members via mailing lists. The above screenshot shows the 'permissions' section where you can select multiple pages and apply view/edit rights in one go.

One of the big limitations with the current PayPal tools is that you have to set up each product separately. Well no more. With the new system you will be able to use the product manager interface and manage the attributes of your products in one place, e.g. price, sizes, colour. Once your products are set up you can display them in your site using 'product display widgets' which make it quick to add and organise many different products on a page, e.g. you can add them just like adding images to a gallery which will automatically set-up the price display and the 'buy'/'add to cart' buttons for you. The above screenshot shows the product manager in 'product list' mode.

So there you go, we are working on them, honest! These are screenshots from the working prototypes, so not just pretty pictures, though the final designs may change a bit as we do usability testing.

Have a wonderful Xmas (or holiday season) and we'll see you all in the New Year. Ho ho ho.

Moonfruit Lounge - Google maps

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

New release - 18th Dec 2008