Moonfruit Lounge - HTML

Cool shops on Moonfruit using the HTML widget

Joe — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:37:00 +0000

Well, we told you the HTML widget would open up new possibilities for e-commerce. And it looks like a few of our cutting edge users have started to integrate full-blown Amazon stores into their Moonfruit websites. Clever them ;-)

Of course this won't stop us working on our own e-commerce upgrade which is due out mid next year, but it certainly gives you something to get on with.

The Strictly Swimming home page with large shop link

So how have they done this?

The secret lies in the HTML Snippet widget and the Amazon widgets, specifically the aStore.

You can find the HTML Snippet widget in the File Manager, or on the New Toolbar, by using: 'Insert' menu -> 'Smart widgets' (side bar) there is a specific HTML widget for the 'Amazon Widgets'. Once you've added an HTML snippet to your page, the 'Setup' tab on the Editor provides a place to paste in your HTML code and in some cases a link to where to get the code from. Remember these will only work correctly for visitors with FlashPlayer 10 (about 90% market penetration and rising), so some users will not see them correctly, but that number will fall over the coming months.

So how does this look for Strictly Swimming? Well, by inserting the Amazon aStore, they can produce a full product display page as below.

Strictly Swimming product list

And finally you can see the individual product display page, which includes all the cool things from Amazon like user ratings.

Strictly Swimming product page

Check out the full site at www.strictly-swimming.com

And just to show you that there are others doing this too, check out the same from this cool website by The Food Bible.

The Food Bible homepage

The Food Bible shop page

The Food Bible product page

Check it out at www.thefoodbible.net.

New release - 29 September 2009 - New interface, HTML widget, site copy and more...

Joe — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:00:00 +0100

Yeah, it's release time again! Believe it or not we get just as excited as you do at these times. The months of hard work all come together and we get to push new things out to the Moonfruit-osphere. And this one is a biggy too.

So first things first, the new interface. For those of you who didn't see our sneak preview, this is what it looks like.

General edit functions (click to enlarge image).

We're seeing the largest overhaul to the edit environment in the last 5 years as we drag SiteMaker kicking and screaming into the present and pave the way for the future. The long awaited HTML widget is now out of beta, works in all browsers (ooooohh), and opens up libraries of additional content. And you can now copy an entire site too...

New Toolbar (beta)
Some call it SiteMaker5, some call it Moonfruit+, all we know is we call it the New Toolbar. It's been launched as an opt-in beta version, which means it's fully functional, you can choose it, you can use it, but you're not forced to. We're looking for feedback - good and bad (constructive) - so that we can polish it off for a final release at a later stage. But it works and in our testing so far makes things far quicker and easier to do.

To get to it, login to your site and go to 'View' --> 'New Toolbar (beta)'. Your site will reload in the new environment but you can revert to the old style toolbars at any time. The advantages of the new Toolbar are:

Use the full screen browser for editing - you can move edit tools outside the boundary of your site
Zoom in/out while editing - you make your site bigger/smaller to help 'see' it in full glory
Sticky edit tools - the Toolbar remains at the top and the Editor will remain on screen as you scroll up and down
Show off-screen objects - if you drag something off your site (outside the boundary), you can choose to hide or display off screen objects (new under 'view')
Detailed insert menu - more objects can be added in one click, including some new HTML snippets ('Insert' menu)
Quick pages menu - includes quick ways to add pages, copy pages and change page length, plus edit meta data (for search engines) more quickly (see 'Pages' menu)
Links to other services - Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, AdSense can all be viewed without leaving your site (new 'Services' menu)

The major drive for this change was to better organise the features available and create the structure so that we can expand services further in the future. Moonfruit has grown to include so many features over the years, sometimes the most important ones get lost, so this is an opportunity to re-present them for how they are used today. When we started many years ago we built a 'Page editor' whereas today SiteMaker allows the management of your website over its whole lifecycle. From initial build -> monitoring traffic and performance -> developing community -> monetisation -> ongoing updates.

Copy/transfer site
Some new features in the 'Admin' section are the copy site and transfer site features. This allows you to create a copy of the design and structure of your site which you can use as the basis of a new site. Please note this isn't a complete copy like backup, as some data is not copied, e.g. individual posts in comment feeds or forums. But the text, images, design, structure, etc., are all applied to the new site.

The transfer site feature allows you to transfer an existing site (or a new copy) to another user of Moonfruit.

Both features have been asked for many times, both by customers that want to build more sites themselves and by resellers who find they want to build similar sites for clients in similar industries over and over. These new features will help make that easier to achieve.

The HTML widget
You can't add HTML to a Flash site, don't be ridiculous! Or can you ;-) ? Some of you will have been using the Beta version of this widget for some time now, but for others this will be new. The HTML snippet widget allows you to paste in HTML code (or markup for the purists out there) that you might find elsewhere (Amazon affiliates, Youtube videos, Twitter feeds, etc.) into your Moonfruit website and use it seamlessly with our other features. The changes/improvements for this release are:

The widget now works in all major browsers - Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and on PC and Mac
Works with all HTML snippets (probably - we can't find any yet it doesn't work with, but I'm sure you will ;-)
Some regularly used services (Youtube player, Twitter feed, etc.) have some preconfigured widgets (snippets) available to help you get started (use the 'Setup' tab to get the HTML code)

So this new feature makes available all Google Gadgets, all Widgetbox widgets, all Amazon widgets and more. Happy hunting!!

But remember, this still only works if you have the Flash 10 player!! Currently FP10 has around 86% penetration according to Adobe but growing by 3-4% per month.

Product selling page templates
There are now some new product selling page templates with suggested layouts for creating easy to use product pages on Moonfruit. You can do this in the 'Add page' option in the 'pages' menu.

For those of you waiting, these are not the long awaited e-commerce updates, so apologies about that, but we are still working towards that goal and the interface lays yet further foundations for the e-commerce tools that will require these new technologies to work as well as they can.

Anyway, so that's about it. We hope you enjoy it and let us know what you think! Enjoy!

Known issues with new beta toolbar (keyboard shortcuts)

Keyboard shortcuts, such as copy, paste and delete among others, do not work in the beta toolbar
The Ctrl key does not work, e.g for multiple select and for drag select or for forcing links to work in edit mode
In Firefox, keyboard nudge, enter and tab keys do not work and the cursor will not flash in any text field

HTML widget - what have you found?

Joe — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 10:40:00 +0000

So, it's been a month or so since we released the alpha (early testing) version of the HTML widget. We've had nearly 250 people download and try out the widget in our website builder from our site labs.moonfruit.com, so we know you've been using it. But the thing we want to know is what have you been using it for?

We're working away on getting the widget ready for a beta release (slightly more robust), which we will distribute more widely. And once we've done that we can start to produce specific versions for the things you want to use it for.

But firstly and update on the bugs. You might remember that currently the HTML widget only works correctly if you view the site using Internet Explorer 6 or above, with Flash Player 10. So for Firefox users, it displays the HTML content below the site so they can still see it, but its not ideal.

We've had some exciting news from Firefox that the bug that prevents the HTML widget correctly displaying in your site for Firefox users will be fixed in the 3.1 release of the browser, due sometime in the next couple of months (hopefully). This is great, as this bug was something we couldn't fix ourselves.

The main bug that we're looking at on our side is why some HTML snippets don't load correctly, which seems to be mainly those that use external JavaScript files in the HTML, e.g. Google AdSense or any Google Gadgets widget. Hopefully we'll be able to fix that too and open the net wider.

Once the HTML widget is fully robust we hope to be able to offer many different pre-configured flavours of it. There will always be the generic 'paste in any HTML' widget, but we'll also do some that are focused on particular services. For example a Youtube multi-video player (http://www.youtube.com/custom_player), or a twitter widget (http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/twidget). Both of these work with the current HTML alpha widget.

So which ones have you found that you like? Which HTML widgets do you think we should make available as pre-configured choices? Let us know and we'll add them to the list. Can you add a link to the widget you are using so we can see it?

As our customers you have the best idea about the things you really want to use yourselves, so if we can add them we will. Thanks for your help.

Remember we said HTML was impossible - well maybe not completely impossible...

Joe — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 08:09:00 +0000

Joe: Here is a true account from the development team of what happens when you leave them by themselves for a week, as told by Adam (one of our dev guys). Perhaps we should leave them alone more often...

Adam: So there we were, back from our Christmas holidays and nary a manager in sight. 'Organise yourselves this week' they said, giving the tech team free reign to work together and see what we could come up with. And what a week it turned out to be.

As some of you may know, we've been using scrum to manage SiteMaker development for some time now, so we're used to splitting projects down into week-long chunks of work. But what should we work on for a week? Better back-end services? Finish off the internal media manager?

Being bright-eyed and bushy-tailed after our break, one suggestion shone out like a beacon above all the others:

"Why don't we do the HTML widget when no-one's looking?"

The fact was that over the months and years while we've been repeatedly fending off requests with the simple response "sorry, it's not possible!", the browser landscape had been changing. CSS, IFrames, DOM manipulation had all made their way into the mainstream, so it looked like the scene was set. Deliver something that you lot had been asking for for years, work as a tight-knit team on something cool and give management a huge surprise all in one!

Not so fast

OK, so we hit a (pretty big) wall - there are still unresolved browser issues which mean that it isn't ready for general release.

The problem is that in order to float HTML content over a SiteMaker site, we need to enable a special Flash rendering mode (wmode opaque, for those really interested) if the HTML were to display properly on all our supported browsers. Initially we thought that there would be a huge performance hit associated with this mode, so there was some resistance to the idea, but testing soon showed that our fears were unfounded. We worked on the editing interface, the JavaScript code, the back-end support and the non-Flash accessible version as a team, aiming at a commonly agreed goal for the end of the week. We were on course to get the whole thing done and dusted and released on the unsuspecting world, on spec and on time...

However, there was a more sinister bug hiding in the wings that only reared its head in the wee hours of Friday morning. Bizarrely, if we use the special rendering mode, Flash sees your keyboard as a US keyboard. So for us Brits, " (shift-2) and @ (shift-') are swapped. But there's a whole world out there using SiteMaker and unfortunately breaking it for everyone outside of the USA is not really an option. We can't really tell everyone in France to stop using accented characters, or everyone in Greece or Russia to start using the Latin alphabet.

The future looks brighter

More encouragingly, we found that recent versions of the Flash Player work properly in IE, and that it looks like Firefox should have it fixed 'soon' (the bug was reported in December 2004(!) and appears to have been fixed in December 2008).

So, while we wait for the world to catch up and get this bugfix released and deployed to everyone's computers, we thought that we'd at least let you see our new widget in action, and then see what you think. You can now try out the effect that the wmode setting has on your own computer and see for yourself that, while we're *nearly* there, we have to wait for everyone to upgrade to flash player 10 and for Firefox 3.2 to be released.

The Moonfruit lab

So, while this week has been one of elation tinged with sadness, it did give us the opportunity to start on labs.moonfruit.com - where we hope to share more in-development work with you and hopefully get some feedback.

Please pay us a visit - and see the mythical HTML Snippet widget in action :-)

We will offer some of you the chance to download and use the widget for yourselves, though you have to bear in mind that it doesn't work in all cases yet (only IE 6 or above with Flash player 10). You can apply to join the alpha test on the Moonfruit labs site. See you there."

Joe: So there you have it. Perhaps next time we leave them alone they'll create a perpetual motion machine!

SiteMaker and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - Part VII - Taxi Royal

Walt — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 17:21:00 +0000

Another year, another Rambo movie (yawn), another Pixar movie - Wall-E (nice), and another Batman movie (yeah!!!). So what else is 'same, same but different', as they say in Thailand, this year? A year on and it was time to revisit our favourite taxi company - Joe's West London Taxis - and see how it was doing in the Search Engine rankings.

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.

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 - 08 July 2008

Joe — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 10:00:00 +0100

Help, it's another monster release! It's just too big; we can't keep giving away so many new features. The poor development team, they really need a holiday. But it's good news for you and our website builder! So, keep reading...

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
See www.moonfruit.com/domains.html for details

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

And plenty of bug fixes, including fixing the Google SiteMap error in Webmaster tools, logging into sites from the portal, fixes for image problems in Directory and Calendar.

That's about it for now. We are of course working on more goodies for the future, but you'll have to wait and see for those. Let us know if you have any feedback or any problems with the new features. Thanks, and happy holidays!