Moonfruit Lounge - community

Get Blogging with Moonfruit!

Sarah — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 15:52:00 +0100

Last week we put our blog feature out into the wild in public beta for everyone to try out and see what they thought of it. The feedback to date has been great and we're really glad that you all like it! The blog platform is waiting for you all to give it a try.

To help you get started we have 9 new beautiful blog specific templates for you to choose from. Alternatively you can use a standard template and tailor this to meet your own blogging needs.

We've had a few questions about what a blog actually is and how it might be useful to your business so here goes!

Blogging has been around since 1997 (in it's long form name weblog, shortened to blog around 1999). Since then people have been building these types of sites and as of 16 February 2011, there were over 156 million public blogs in existence. Today the lines are very much blurred between what a blog is and what a website is. Traditionally a website was something were you update individual pages with content in the form of text, images, audio and video. There was no concept of when it was published and you couldn't easily syndicate it to other sites.

In comparison to a website, blogging provides a way to structure your content as 'posts' in reverse chronological order, with the most recent post available at the top of the page. Posts can be tagged to be able to find relevant content first and is published through a standard called RSS (the orange icons that you see on the internet). This in turn can be used to re-publish your content to other services automatically, such as TwitterFeed.com for publishing blog content to Twitter. Something that is fast becoming the norm with blogging is the ability to share your posts through Facebook and Twitter using the Like and Tweet buttons. Most blog platforms provide this as an extra that you have to add in yourself - we've taken all the pain away and it's there by default.

You can use a blog in various ways depending on whether you are blogging as a business or blogging for pleasure. If you are a business looking to use the Moonfruit blogging feature then you may choose to use it for letting people know about your latest products, Maybe provide news or information around what your company is up to at the moment, providing your customers with an insight into the inner workings of your business. Your blog isn't just about publishing either. When you publish a post you can enable comments and then have conversations with potential customers creating a community.

As an individual you can use your blog to share your passions, interests and insights. It is a place to share and learn from others. The world is your oyster and now is the time to give it a try!

Moonfruit Sites: Celebrating the Royal Wedding!

leila — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 11:25:00 +0100

Tomorrow Kate Middleton from Bucklebury, Berkshire will marry Prince William and become part of the royal family. As a result there are all sorts of exciting things happening in the UK during the bank holiday including street parties and events in honour of the royal wedding. Some businesses have themed their websites or got involved in their local street parties so we thought we would feature a couple of those Moonfruit sites that have been doing some of these things.

The most fascinating story that we found relating to a Moonfruit website and the up coming royal wedding was the story of Claire's Cakes which is based in Kate Middleton's local village Bucklebury. Claire has baked an amazing 1000 person wedding cake to share with the community at their street party in Bucklebury. She was featured yesterday on BBC Radio Berkshire with Maggie Philbin as well as in the Berkshire Life and is one of our valued Moonfruit Community. I'm sure you'll see her cake featured as part of the news commentary surrounding the royal wedding and the home village that Kate grew up in.

Going to the other end of the spectrum and looking more around the magic of make believe. The cutest royal wedding party that we have found is a dress up as a prince or princess day being held by Wonderland in Telford. The event itself is being held on the Bank Holiday Monday for budding princes and princesses to take part in after seeing the royal wedding!

We also launched a competition for site of the day to see who could revamp their website in the union jack colours or to celebrate the royal wedding. You'll find the details of this up on our Facebook Page. The winner will be our site of the day throughout the royal wedding long weekend!

What are you doing to celebrate the royal wedding? We'd love to know!

My Moonfruit Experience - by Simon Waller

leila — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 12:03:00 +0100

I’ve learned a lot of important things in my 37 years on this planet.

I learned to walk and run and climb trees. I then learned how to dress myself and play football and snowboard. I learned how to make friends and lose them and I learned how to get a job. I learned that shouting wasn’t the answer and that I looked like an idiot with long hair, although I never realised it at the time. I learned to earn money and take care of my family but that however much money you have, it’s never enough. Then I learned about Moonfruit.

Now you may think it’s over-cooking it a little to compare Moonfruit with my lifetime of accomplishments…but then, it really is a rather good website tool.

I became a father in 2006 and immediately came under pressure to deliver a constant stream of up-to-the-second snapshots of our new addition to friends and relatives based all over the world. Actually when you stop to think about it, it’s pretty incredible that 5 years ago my family in Spain were demanding instant pictures when 5 years before that they hadn’t heard of bloody email! Anyway, since then another two bundles of joy have arrived and the pressure to keep everyone up to speed hasn’t eased.

So, here I am in 2006 and my Dreamweaver skills have peaked at just short of ‘novice’. I was spending more time updating my rubbish website than I was my spending with my own newborn child. It was time for a change. It was time to find a better way to build a website that did the job quickly and looked professional too.

I stumbled on Moonfruit, I’ve no idea now how I found it, but when I did I loved it instantly. I built a basic picture gallery site and have been refining it ever since. It’s fair to say that I’d be lost without it.

Having said all that, there is another reason for my love affair with Moonfruit. It represents all that is good in a modern company. It has a public face… Joe is real, and he answers your emails. It is progressive and inclusive and is striving to improve itself. It listens when you have a problem and it is interested in your little successes in life. Now if Moonfruit were a real person, you’d be saying ” Hey, that Moonfruit is a great guy isn’t he!” and you’d be right. If Moonfruit were a real person, I’d want to be his mate, he’d definitely have my back, and I imagine he’d have a way with the ladies; but I digress.

I have yet more reasons to be such a Moonfruit evangelist. I am a two time winner of recent competitions. One for innovative use of design for this piece of nonsense http://thingsihavelearned.moonfruit.com for which I won a year of free hosting and more recently the #flymeto competition for which I won a trip to Tokyo with my wife. So, call me biased, but I love those crazy Moonfruit guys.

To me, Moonfruit is more than a webhost. The world is full of hosting companies, and I should know, I work for one of largest in the world, but I use Moonfruit because it makes my life easy and it provides a vibrant community of like-minded misfits to shoot the breeze with.

I’m no designer and I’m no techy and I am sure there are a whole host of reasons why one host is better for this and one is better for that and I would probably agree with you, if I understood what you said (which I probably wouldn’t). But forgetting the nuts and bolts for a minute Moonfruit is a company I really enjoy using. I’ve been a customer for around 5 years and in that time I’ve recommended scores of friends and family to sign up. I’ve never had anything but thanks for the recommendation and that’s important ’cos there’s nothing worse than disappointing your friends.

So, thanks for the great service (and the flights to Tokyo!!!), and keep up the good work

Simon Waller

A month at Moonfruit

leila — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 17:17:00 +0100

I’ve been at Moonfruit for an entire month now, which is hard to believe. How time flies when you’re having fun!

I’ve spent a lot of my time in the past month finding my way around the product as well as talking to our users via the Moonfruit forum, Twitter and Facebook. The comments and feedback from everyone has been great. It’s given me a much better understanding of the Moonfruit community as a whole.

We’ve introduced ‘Site of the Day’ which has been very popular amongst our Twitter and Facebook followers. The Facebook group is going from strength to strength and we now have over 300 fans, many of which have been contributing to it on a daily basis. Do keep an eye out on the Facebook group over the next few months as we will be making a few changes as well as announcing up and coming features and some exciting new competitions.

In the mean time, I would love to hear your ideas – I have been sent some great ideas for competitions as well as new features people would like to see implemented. Your thoughts are very important to us.

I will be keeping you up to date on what’s happening here at Moonfruit HQ every Friday. If there’s a particular subject you would like me to cover, please email me: social@moonfruit.com

Finally, I just wanted to thank everyone for making me feel so welcome.

Leila