Blog

Thu, 21 Jul 2011

Sarah

Sarah

Thu, 21 Jul 2011, 17:30

21 comments

Release notes

Moonfruit Blog Beta is now Live!

Calling all Moonfruiters! Blogging has been used as a global platform for announcements for some time now. It has provided a stage for the public to sadly learn that Lance Armstrong was to race his last Tour de France, or that Christiano Ronaldo had suddenly become a father. Blogging has become a natural tool for announcements, news and sharing content. We are really happy to announce (conveniently through a blog) that we here at Moonfruit are releasing the Moonfruit Blog Beta! We would love you to take a look and try it out.

The blog platform is a simple to use set of tools enabling you to update your blog page quickly and simply. You have a range of different ways in which you can do this in the editor. Firstly click on the blog beta button to add your blog content. Then create your first post.

You can have three different types of post: a text post, which is a post that only contains text; an article post, which enables images and text as well as being able to split an article across multiple pages; and finally an image post, which is (unsurprisingly!) a post that display images. If you are in a hurry and just want to write a quick text post then on the blog dashboard you can use the quick post feature. This will take the first line of your post as the title and send it straight out. If this is your first post then when you click to publish you'll be prompted to add your blog page to your site.

Blog Admin

As with all good blog platforms you can add tags to your posts and all posts are published to an RSS feed. On top of all this you can add metadata to every post enabling you to control your SEO (search engine optimisation) on a post by post basis. You will also find some global settings in the blog settings area. In this section you can set global site wide tags and the image alignment as well as decide how many posts you would like to be able to see on the blog page.

The thing that makes the Moonfruit blog different from other blog platforms is the ability to be creative with your blog site design. Just like with other pages a blog page can be edited through simple click, drag and edit. Quite simply what you see is what you get. If you have any questions on how to use the blog or find any "unusual features" then just ask.

Here are are a few Moonfruit sites that are already using our blog functionality. Do share your blog sites with us, it's always interesting to see what is of interest to you!

Blog Examples

We look forward to hearing about your experience with the blog.

And one bonus blog link The Moonfruit Intern blog.

Mon, 11 Jul 2011

Clare

Clare

Mon, 11 Jul 2011, 15:55

Moonfruit in the news

Geeky world of IT loses its appeal as a career choice

The participation of women in technology appears to be falling. In the UK, women accounted for just 18 per cent of technology professionals in 2010, down from 22 per cent in 2001.

Continue reading...

Fri, 8 Jul 2011

Clare

Clare

Fri, 8 Jul 2011, 15:26

Moonfruit in the news

Real Business: Interview with Wendy Tan White

Moonfruit's Wendy Tan White on losing it all, getting it back, and buying £795 Louboutins.

Continue reading...

Fri, 24 Jun 2011

Sarah

Sarah

Fri, 24 Jun 2011, 17:21

19 comments

Release notes

A new and fruity update!

The lovely team here at Moonfruit have been hard at work for the past couple of weeks and have released a minor update for you. We’ve been doing some performance enhancements on the blog which is currently in beta and it is now loading faster than it used to. The update also fixes a bug with the Google Search widget and forum search is back up and running! If you are based in the USA or Australia you may also find that our site loads a bit faster than it used to as well.

New templates

Sticking with the template tradition of always having new templates with updates, we've got 5 new ones available on the site wall on Moonfruit.com. Here’s a sneak peak!

Template Images

And that's about that for now. As always let us know if you have any comments or concerns and if you find any bugs or oddities, please let us know!

Thu, 23 Jun 2011

Clare

Clare

Thu, 23 Jun 2011, 17:18

Moonfruit in the news

Startup Donut: Wendy Tan White - the website pioneer

Some call her the UK’s first lady of technology. She’s also CEO and co-founder of Moonfruit, the trading name of DIY website construction tool SiteMaker, which helps those with limited knowledge to create professional-looking websites. Some 3.6m such sites have been created using Moonfruit’s software since it launched in 2000. But as Wendy Tan-White explains to Mark Williams, sometimes you’ve got to fail to succeed

Perhaps it was inevitable that Wendy Tan-White would end up working in IT. Born in Salford in 1970, her family moved to Cumbernauld in Scotland with her dad’s job when she was two. “Few people worked with computers then, dad was ahead of his time. We moved to Reading when I was nine, dad got a job with Racal, which became Vodafone. Mum did a degree and ended up working in IT, too.”

At grammar school the teachers filled pupils with self-belief, Wendy recalls. After A-levels, she did a degree in computer science at Imperial College in London. “I went from an all-girl school to a course where only seven out of 120 students were female. I was living in halls in South Kensington, it was all very new and exciting. At Imperial we were using state-of-the-art equipment ― and the internet ― it was only 1989.”

To read more of this article click here:

Clare

Clare

Thu, 23 Jun 2011, 16:54

Moonfruit in the news

Start up TV: Wendy Tan White - Mother of Moonfruit

The story of how Wendy started Moonfruit, almost lost it in the dot.com crash and nursed it back to full financial health. You can also hear an interview with Wendy.

To read this article click here:

Clare

Clare

Thu, 23 Jun 2011, 15:22

Moonfruit in the news

SKY NEWS: New Tech Bubble

Recent news of LinkedIn’s increased value to over $3bn has raised alarm bells regarding overvalued tech companies. With the likes of Groupon’s estimated worth of $15bn, there are concerns that we’re in a tech bubble all too familiar to the one a decade ago, whereby investments shoot up from non-tech savvy investors to create over-inflated valuations. Guest blogger Wendy Tan White, founder and CEO of Moonfruit.com, comments.

My view is that firstly I don’t necessarily believe LinkedIn is overvalued. They have products in the pipeline that can crystalise more value from their customer base and increase revenues.

With regards to whether we’re in a tech bubble, well a bubble starts when valuations of a business starts to diverge from the underlying true market trend. This happened in 1999 when crazy valuations were happening for companies with no revenue! It's different this time around as companies have real revenues. Groupon is only 2 years old and is already generating $1bn in revenues.

I think it's too early to confirm if there is a bubble, but there are secondary indicators that give me the impression of the early stages of one. For example, the valuations of companies at the early angel investor stages, the valuations on the secondary markets of Facebook and Twitter, and the planned IPOs of these companies, could all point to the makings of a tech bubble.

This can start to bring in investment from wider non-tech investors, and the start of a bandwagon begins. Once Facebook IPOs are announced ostensibly later next year this will fuel investment by those non-tech savvy investors previously mentioned, who will participate in less successful companies at over-inflated valuations.

People point to the Facebook IPO as being the equivalent of the Netscape float in 1995, and the peak of that bubble didn't happen until the end of 2000. We’ve learnt a lot from this cycle and the market information that wasn’t available last time. I think Facebook’s coming IPO will accelerate the cycle, and potentially bring about a peak of investment in the next 2/3 years.

We experienced the first bubble raising VC investment in 1999, and just scraped through the dotcom crash when many didn’t. This time we have real accelerating revenues and are attracting investment for the right reasons – raising $2.25m series A investment in September 2010, and funding from silicon valley-based 500Startups in March 2011. As such, small and medium businesses are paying for our simple, intuitive, design led website builder in droves.

I'm constantly watching to see what part of the cycle we're in and how that affects Moonfruit’s business. But the first priority will always be to run and accelerate a sustainable business, and think about the market valuation second.

For the original article, please click here

Wed, 1 Jun 2011

Joe

Joe

Wed, 1 Jun 2011, 11:14

52 comments

Release notes

Beta blog update and some image goodies

Team fruit have been beavering away on some blog bug fixing and additional feature requests like highly trained little software ninja's – silently, stealthily and with great precision (except the occasional bug). So we have a small bundle of goodies to push out today. They are:

Image light-boxes

One of the requests that came in from the blog was to allow blog images to pop-up to full size to be seen in all their glory. We liked this so much we thought we'd apply it to all images in the product. When selecting an image on the page there's now a new 'pop-up' tab in the Editor allowing you to set the pop-up flag, the pop-up image and an image caption.

popUpEditor.jpg
New pop-up editor panel

lightboxPopup.jpg
Image shown in full screen light-box

NB. This feature isn't available for images inside galleries or frames, but we'll look at extending it further in the future.

Blog Beta feature improvements!

(To join the blog beta, please see the details on the last article!)

New features

  • Tweet button on each article, both post and list view
  • Admin can set a display name to show as 'author' on the post rather than using the 'username' in the blog settings section
  • Admins can backdate posts so you can add in historical (or hysterical) articles
  • An RSS feed is now available, and an RSS button will appear on the blog template
  • A button to return to the list view is now available on all posts
  • Blog images will pop-up in a light-box effect (see above)
  • Images are now organised in folders in the blog file picker
  • Admins can turn off comments globally in the blog settings section
  • Links will be automatically created in article text if you type a URL when adding a post
  • Admins can set a default folder for blog image uploads
  • Tags on posts now link to filtered tag results, e.g. A list page per tag

Bug fixes

  • Links in posts are now working (hurray!)


tweetButton.jpg
New Tweet button on posts

blogAdminChanges.jpg
Changes in the blog admin

We're still working on the rendering performance which we hope to ship in the next couple of weeks at which point the blog will be turned on for all users. We will continue to work on new features throughout the year too, though large parts of the team will be moving onto the shop.

NB. To get the new blog template (with the RSS button, tweet button, etc.), you will need to delete your current blog page (not the blog itself just the page) and add a new page back in from the pages section. The new blog page will not be default style again, so you will need to reapply your look and feel, and other items on the page will be lost. So you may want to copy all the page items to another page first, then delete the blog page, re-add it then copy them back. Sorry this is a bit inelegant, we'll look at changing that too.

New templates

And just for good measure we thought we'd keep up the tradition of adding in some new templates. So we've got 16 new ones now on the site wall on Moonfruit.com. Some of them look at little like this…

newTemplates1.jpg
newTemplates2.jpg
newTemplates3.jpg

And that's about that for now. As always let us know if you have any comments or concerns and if you find any bugs or oddities, please let us know!

Fri, 6 May 2011

leila

leila

Fri, 6 May 2011, 10:30

22 comments

Jobs

Marketing Student Placement

Company Overview

Moonfruit is a London based team of developers, designers and entrepreneurs who are passionate about great design, great products and supporting small businesses, start-ups and design communities. And we are looking for a smart, up coming marketing student to join our team for a summer or 12 month placement with the opportunity to go permanent!

This is a great internship opportunity for a university student interested in marketing and PR to gain the experience necessary for employment in the future.

Responsibilities

Responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

  • Data entry
  • Competitor analysis
  • Business analysis
  • Writing blogs
  • Engaging in social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn)
  • Assisting and appearing at networking events
  • Answering emails and liaising with our PR agency
  • Assisting in general marketing tasks

You will report to the Marketing Manager and work with designers and customer support team on a regular basis as well as with the software development team on some occasions.

Qualifications

Required Skills

  • Good knowledge of Microsoft Excel
  • Good literary skills
  • Innovative
  • Good understanding of Facebook and Twitter
  • Strong interest in Marketing
  • Studying for or recently graduate in a degree in business, communication, social sciences with good grades

How to Apply

To apply for this role please send a cover letter and a copy of your CV jobs (at) moonfruit.com

Wed, 4 May 2011

leila

leila

Wed, 4 May 2011, 11:20

59 comments

General chat

Moonfruit Blog Beta is here!

We've been working extremely hard behind the scenes here at Moonfruit HQ, and we're pleased to tell you the blog is now available in private beta. We've been private beta testing the new blogging tool for the past 2 weeks and would now like to open it to a few more of our customers to try out.

NB. We do have a number of known bugs that we're working on, all the details can be found on our Beta Blog. Please remember this is very much a work in progress and with your feedback, we can make the necessary improvements to get the full release out as soon as possible. Currently large blog posts will load and layout slowly in your site. We are working on fixing this performance issue along with the other bugs.

To take part in the beta testing, you must register at www.blogbeta.moonfruit.com. Once you have done so, you will then have the option to add a blog. You can add a blog to your site by adding a new page and selecting 'Blog'.

The key features of the new blog include:

  • Style your blog like any other Moonfruit page
  • Easy to use admin tool for adding and editing posts
  • Save drafts, publish now or schedule posts for a later date
  • Allow users to comment and easily manage replies through the Comment list
  • Change the meta data per post like any other Moonfruit page
  • Facebook share functionality on all posts (other sharing options are being worked on currently)
  • Tag your posts to make them easier to find

'Dashboard' view

'Add a Post' view

Many of you will be keen to know how it looks on a site, and how it renders on mobile. Within your site you can style the blog elements by selecting them and using the Editor as with any other page content. We're also pleased to say that the HTML view is also in place and renders nicely on an iPhone and other mobile devices. 

'Site and HTML' view

The blog authors name will default automatically to your username if you haven't filled out your details in the admin section. To change this, follow these steps:

  • Go to edit mode and select 'Admin' in the top navigation bar.
  • Under 'Account' in the navigation on the left hand side, click on 'Your Details'
  • Select the 'Your Details' tab in the pop up and click on 'view or edit your details'
  • Run through the questions and you will be asked for a forename and surname this is what will then be shown as your blog author. It defaults to the username if these aren't filled out.

A few simple requests when using the beta blog. It is in beta, so please read the bugs list first and if you spot anything, then please feel free to let us know. Please do not contact support about beta blog issues as these will need to go through our submission processes on the blog beta site so we can collate and new feedback. Play with it, use it and have fun!

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