Moonfruit Lounge - Moonfruit

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

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!

Twitter censors Moonfruit? What does it mean for the future of Twitocracy?

Wendy — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:08:00 +0100

Late Friday night 3rd July, around midnight UK time Moonfruit finally tumbled off the top of the trends list on Twitter. Now this wasn’t wholly unexpected with July 4th on the way and the resignation of Sarah Palin. But what was odd is how it that it never returned despite the stats being above other trending topics. If you compare Moonfruit vs Wimbledon in terms of share of tweets (see graph below), you can see Moonfruit has ranked higher at all times except the Men’s final. But Wimbledon has been a trending topic several times over the weekend. I’ve also included data for Serena and Venus which have also been on the top trends list.

http://twist.flaptor.com/?span=168&gram=moonfruit%2Cwimbledon%2Cserena%2Cvenus

There is further data available at http://hashtags.org/ which shows popular hashtag topics. So on balance it looks like the Moonfruit tag has been removed from the trends list by Twitter.

We also sent an email to Twitter on Saturday asking them about this, but have yet to get a reply. It may be because it’s been the 4th July weekend, so we'll wait and see but given the profile of this story and the furore in the twittersphere we would expect them to respond?

What does this mean?

Ok, first things first. When we started this we wanted to create a buzz there’s no doubt about that. But we didn’t expect the campaign to become so large. And believe it or not, we didn’t want to dominate Twitter for 10 days, or push important subjects like Iran off the agenda.

But given how it has turned out we are also touched by how people have responded to the brand and campaign. We love how they’ve questioned it, played with it, joked about it, sung about it, painted it, made it out of fruit, shouted at it and made it what it is through their participation. We are in awe of the brilliance and creativity of the Twittersphere. So thank you all.

However, we also recognise that the campaign sets a dangerous precedent and could have implications for how Twitter is used and abused by marketers. This is a subject much commented on (see Mashable, Techcrunch, BBC), etc.

So if Twitter had come to us and said, “guys, enough is enough”, then we would have worked with them to limit the campaign, or complied with whatever they were demanding. However, if they have pulled the trending without explanation or communication, this sets rather a different tone.

Not to be misinterpreted, it’s certainly their right to protect their network and technology investment. (And incidentally, I think taking us off the trends at this point is the right thing for Twitter, and I’m happy with that response). But as a company that strives to provide a real time, democratic communication platform, we don't believe taking action quietly behind the scenes is the right answer, not exactly transparent. Particularly given the numbers of press, marketers, businesses and consumers on twitter following this campaign right now.

I’ve said it before in comments on other blogs, but this is probably a commercial channel for Twitter in the future (I’m sure they’ve thought about it! Maybe we've touched a nerve.) Perhaps there should be ‘commercial trends’ vs ‘normal trends’ lists. And its certainly been said that users should be able to filter their feeds to remove ‘commercial’ or unwanted tags.

What would help me is a clear understanding of what happened, and therefore what the new ‘rules of the game’ are going forward. What does this mean for topics on Twitter? What does it mean for marketers? If we were removed as ‘spam’, when did we become spam, was it ok for the first few days, just not after? And are the creative responses, videos, images, songs, etc. all just spam? (see 'Real people get creative with Moonfruit').

Two oil paintings of Moonfruit? A woman paper-maching her face to look like a moon (while eating fruit)? A ransom letter to Moonfruit demanding a Mac? A man making his lunch zuchinni into the words ‘Moonfruit’? Writing songs and penning Haiku’s? Teenagers dancing and producing films? Is this spam?

Maybe there's no right answer, ultimately only what the twitter crowd agree. Perhaps if they had been given a bit longer they would have decided for themselves. That's the intention surely of 'follow' and 'unfollow'.

What does the Twitterverse think?

Twitter, what happened?

Important Update – Big Bang Finale!

The competition response has been crazy and wonderful. Thank you all. But to bring the mayhem to a close and remain respectful to the Twitterverse, we’ve decided to bring forward the end date from Friday 10th July to Tuesday 7th July (e.g. this week).
This means all remaining Macbook Pros will be given away on this last day. Still 10 Macbooks, just in 7 days not 10. So there will be 4 winners on Tuesday for Macbook prizes 7, 8, 9 and 10. All will be randomly picked from the last 24 hour of tweets.

We’ll still take creative entries for discretionary prizes, so send them to us @moontweet.

And we’re looking at how we can have an ongoing competition for our customers who built the best new sites each month.

Once again, thank you all for your input, creativity, love and humour (and humor ;-). Best of luck!!

Wendy Tan White

Real people get creative with #moonfruit

Joe — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 22:24:00 +0100

Well we never expected this! Songs, pictures, stories - all about Moonfruit. This crazy thing is getting out of control! We love the things you're doing. You guys have turned this Twitter campaign into a Creative Moonfruit Movement.

NB: Will add as fast as we can. We are using the searches below and a database of tweets to look at entries. Please add to this blog if you think your entries are missing. Thankyou!

Creative responses on YouTube
Creative responses on Flickr
Our 'Thank You' compilation of responses

Here's selection of some we've picked up, sorry we haven't got to everyone yet there are so many:

@sutuma http://bit.ly/Z6IoR (first winner)

@tear96 http://bit.ly/19snmq (2nd winner)

@chadwelch http://bit.ly/w73zF (3rd winner)

@bramketting #Moonfruit didn't comply to my demands so I set the bird free: http://pic.gd/de8f5 It's over: http://bit.ly/1VxxCh (4th winner)

@Felorah http://bit.ly/tKZVX (robot cartoon animation)

@awessendorf http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vckPscOt7Y (cartoon song)

@usebombs http://twitpic.com/9695y (Moonfruit picture quiz)

@topitzman http://bit.ly/krfq6 cool Moonfruit song

@pauldz http://twitpic.com/947yr (moonfruit comic strip)

@ChosenPredator http://bit.ly/VqI8O (moonfruit puppet story)

@sloorp http://bit.ly/143TzF (moonfruit animated story)

@MasterWayne http://twitpic.com/975wm (mathematical fruit)

@eagleascent http://bit.ly/ir3UE (US kid talks to himself)

@pauldz http://bit.ly/UqJSF (picture story)

@fabulouscess http://bit.ly/U1XMa (two sisters singing)

@JorjLim http://bit.ly/17mJNI (so bad it's great)

@aurelienlewin http://twitpic.com/94r44 (radio active moonfruit)

@tgundred http://twitpic.com/991n9 (apple moonfruit)

@kelsiwaslike http://twitpic.com/992ja (another apple moonfruit)

@mayasud http://twitpic.com/994c4 (nice picture nursery rhyme)

@essexgourmet http://twitpic.com/9dzms

@rockstarsharks http://bit.ly/bc4uT (video shows real dedication!)

@lintster http://twitpic.com/9p1sp (cute illustration]

@yashiyama http://twitpic.com/9ff4q (adorable!)

And there's more to come. If you've seen some that you think are great post them here too. Enjoy!

Celebrate 10 years of Moonfruit and win a MacBook Pro

Joe — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:47:00 +0100

To celebrate Moonfruit's 10th birthday we are giving away 10 new Macbook Pro's, one each day for 10 days! If you've never seen one of these in real life, they are just as svelte and beautifully crafted as they look in the pictures, we can't keep our hands off them! (I'm using on now, but not one of the competition ones obviously ;-) )

Check the full details of the competition at http://www.moonfruit.com/macbook-pro.html and follow us @moontweet to find out who the winners are each day.

We wouldn't be here today without all you wonderful people building websites with us and allowing us to support you in your online adventures. So a special thanks to the 2m+ of you who've built a site with us!

Happy tweeting!

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!