Moonfruit Lounge

Moonfruit is the United Kingdom’s leading hosted website builder. The company makes it easy for anyone to set up business or personal websites. Moonfruit has a rapidly growing user base around the world – in fact, one-third of Moonfruit’s users are located in the United States. Customers have used Moonfruit’s design software to build more than 3 million websites.

Read the full story here - http://www.zendesk.com/customer/moonfruit

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A young company works and works on its first (or next great) product. Blood, sweat and tears are sacrificed. When the product is finally finished, they share it with the world. And, guess what? The world loves it. Mainstream media, blogs, Facebook, Twitter — everyone is talking about this young company. “Buzz” has been created.

Read the full story here - http://mashable.com/2011/04/06/startup-momentum/

Following on from our last discussion about keeping your website fresh and topical with all sorts of dynamic content, let’s take a look at how to lay out the content to its best advantage. One way to ensure visitors don’t bounce away merrily looking for somewhere juicier to land is to write snappy headings and sub headings. Here are some top tips...

POSITION IS KEY

Make sure your headlines are at the top of the page and not lost or crowded out by other ‘stuff’. INCLUDE KEYWORDS IN YOUR HEADLINES Good use of your keywords can lead their eyes onto the next paragraph and get them reading your content.

DON’T ADVERTISE

Instead of ‘selling’ to your audience, make your headlines friendly. Also, rather than throwing ‘sales talk’ at your audience, give them valuable content to read and digest.

ALWAYS SHOW OFF THE BENEFITS

Instead of harping on about how good you are, tell your visitors what benefits they get from your products, services and website.

EASY TO READ

Don’t use long, fancy highfalutin words. Use everyday terms with short, catchy phrases.

SHOW DON’T TELL

Keep your sub headings as sharp as your headlines. Think of sites that you like and look at their headline and sub headings. Remember, people scan read so sub headings should grab attention too.

Fresh and Topical

Sticky content is also largely affected by the amount of fresh and new content on your site and its relevance to your audience. Go back to your Navigation Map and recall what you want visitors to do when they hit your site. Good content will ensure you turn those hits into sales, repeat visitors or customers.

My top tip on page layout is to keep it clean and spacious with lots of white space and no headache-inducing clutter. You know what I mean by this, I am sure you have been onto sites that try and cram everything they can into a page and they think they’re clever by using lots of different fonts and colours, yet all they’re doing is giving you an instant headache. Bounce!

REMEMBER THESE PAGE LAYOUT GOLDEN RULES

• Use sub headings
• Use bullets
• Break up paragraphs
• Use web fonts: Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana
• Be clear about your page goals
• Update little and often - in bite size chunks
• Images facing into the page

CONTENT GOLDEN RULES

• Keep it visual, and not cluttered
• New pages and content bring visitors back
• Use shorter pages; viewers don’t like to scroll down too far
• Don’t use too much flashy animations and clip art
• Think carefully before adding background music
• Don’t use pop ups - most people hate them and block them
• Utilise white space, don’t overcrowd
• Stick to between 200 and 250 words if possible
• Add a call to action

PARAGRAPH TIPS

• Keyword-rich content is key
• People scan read so be aware of this
• Highlight key information
• Use punchy phrases
• Keep it simple
• Keep it short, sharp and snappy; no long rambling pages allowed
• Use definite and clear statements
• Fonts shouldn’t be too small or too large, 8 to 12 point is good enough
• Ask and answer questions
• Grammar and spell check is so, so important for credibility
• Break up paragraphs - aim for a maximum of 4 sentences
• Vary sentence length, but lean on the briefer side
• Have a logical sequence to paragraphs

Audience Content

Scan your notes and research on your target audience to ensure you have met all the objectives for providing them with relevant and appealing content. Research other sites and see the different ways they present theirs. Many times in my book we cover the theme ‘Know Your Audience’ and again, this is vital here. If you don’t know and understand their requirements, how will you be able to fulfil their needs with sticky content?

Freebies

Let’s face it, we all love freebies and give aways! So why not offer free stuff to your visitors? This can be in the form of offers and prizes from partner sites or you can give them a choice of free downloads. Either way, it works as an addition to your content and all the while incentivises people to sign up and share your website - a viral marketing tool.

Including a competition on your site also gives you the chance to gather data about your users and start building long term relationships with them. Be careful not to bombard them with junk mail, though, as the relationship will die a quick and sudden death.

One last thing on freebies: it can be a time consuming task sourcing offers and giveaways so only go this route if you have resources in place or know loads of free supplier offers.

Summary

I am sure you can now see the benefit of having good value content on your site and the all important rule to keep adding new information for both visitors and Google. Watch out for the next in this series where we will cover eCommerce and how to earn revenue to monetise your site. Go get that great content!

Award-winning entrepreneur, speaker and bestselling author of ‘Create A Successful Website’, Paula Wynne offers practical workshops to help you succeed online. Find out more about Paula at www.paulawynne.com

Moonfruit's make over is well and truly in full swing and we love it! We've had a huge amount of feedback, most of it extremely positive, though there have also been some complaints about things that we've missed or moved that were more easily available in the old moonfruit.com. We really do value your feedback, as we may under-estimate how important some features are to you, or we may misunderstand how you use them - we're only human after all – so your feedback helps us put things right.

We have been listening to your requests and last Thursday (24th March) we released some updates to the new moonfruit.com that addresses some of these concerns. We also wanted to let you know what else we're looking at.

We had a fair few requests for the 'site counter' to be returned to your site dashboard on moonfruit.com so that you can quickly see how many visitors your site has had since you last looked. This is now back and updates as you flick between your different sites.

Another piece of feedback was that the forums were different and difficult to find. We'd renamed them to the mysterious 'Share and Learn' to reflect the fact that they were so community driven and a place to share and learn. But due to popular demand, we've changed this back to 'Forums' to make them easier to find and the layout should be more familiar to you all with the old categories that we had in the past. 

You may have also noticed there's a profile photo option with the new forum too which is a sign of things to come. At the moment you're not able to use this, but we'll be extending moonfruit.com in the coming months to add this profile feature to make it an even more personal experience (should you wish it to be!). We'll also be looking at migrating some of the old forum content over to the new forums so that they're a bit more complete.

A few of you were finding it a little bit difficult to navigate your way around the new account functions once you were logged in. So, we've made it quicker and easier for you to use. Here's the breakdown of how this will work:

There will be an 'Account' drop-down in the top right hand corner which will give you quick access to the main account functions - Dashboard (your Moonfruit home page), Billing, Support and Domains, as well as the ability to log-out.

The 'Billing' screen will show you a history of what payments you have made and allow you to renew your package. Remember, if you are an existing customer, you will continue to pay the same prices as before, provided you don't upgrade or downgrade, and the best part is you get all of the extra benefits that come with the new packs (extra disk space and bandwidth)! Downloadable receipts are on the way soon.

A quick link to 'Support' has been added to the Account navigation to make it easier to get help. The FAQs and forums are now combined in a single knowledge base so that it is quicker and easier for you to find answers to your questions. Please search this before submitting a ticket to support as this might save you a lot of time.

We have re-introduced the 'Domain Management' option into the Account navigation. We didn't realise just how many of you were going through moonfruit.com to manage your domains, as it is also available within your sites, so we added this to the drop-down for quick and easy access. For those of you who have been having issues managing your domains via the toolbar in your site, chances are you're still using the old toolbar and therefore need to upgrade this to the new toolbar (in the 'View' menu).

As well as these changes, there are a few further bits of feedback that we will work on in line with your comments. Some customers have requested a multi-site view for the site dashboard, particularly those of you with a high volume of sites (particularly resellers). We appreciate that it might be a little tedious to scroll through all the previews to find the site you'd like to update when you have so many, so this is a feature we'll be working on in a future release.

And finally…

You've all been talking about it! YES! You guessed it... The Blog! Our new blogging feature is very nearly finished and we're pleased to say this will be out in April. We haven't got a solid date as yet. But please keep an eye on the Facebook and Twitter feeds as any news will be announced there - as well as on this blog.

Thank you to everyone who helped us test out the new Moonfruit.com in BETA - As you can see from all of the above changes and additions we’ve made, your feedback and suggestions are very important to us and as long as you continue to tell us your thoughts (no matter how brutal), we can continue to deliver a product you love to use!

Entering your company into the world of social media doesn't have to be confusing and daunting. A lot of companies express concerns over tackling issue on such public platforms, but this shouldn't be viewed in a negative light. With the spread of social media over the past few years, people have started to make their issues (even sensitive ones) public in an attempt to get a satisfactory response.

With a lot of companies outsourcing their call centres these days, the feeling of being a valued customer pretty much disappears the moment the switch is made. So by providing a channel, such as Twitter or Facebook, can help deal with very awkward customers and also help retain them. But the only way of achieving this is to ensure you keep these channels monitored on a regular basis. Be personal in your messages and responses. Try to respond to every question and remember that people, in these spaces, as well as asking questions and ranting, will also find a place to show your company/ product love.

Another way if engaging with your customers is to keep a company/ product blog. Any product news, press coverage and technical issues should be highlighted in your blog. If you're in a specialist area you should think about ideas for features which are relevant to your industry and this may pull in more readers and even potential customers. Relevant material is likely to be linked to by other similar sites, blogs, and interested parties and this in turn will increase your SEO.

It's good to be social! Keep on top of customer questions, issues and most importantly, feedback. By getting good feedback from your customers, you can work towards making your business/ product the best it can be. Try different social media platforms and find the one that works best for you. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Linkedin are the main platforms, however, do your research as there may be something out there that's more suited to your particular industry.

Here at Moonfruit HQ, we do our best to keep on top of all questions, issues and feedback. But as with any company using social media, we're always learning too. We always try to get back to you as soon as we can, hence our recent adoption of Facebook and Twitter for communication, but unfortunately we're currently unable to be online 24/7. So if you don't get a response immediately, we will get back to you as soon as we can ;-)

Our communication channels are still evolving. We continue to learn, tweak, and improve as we go but for us social media now plays a big part in how we communicate with our customers more effectively.

Good Luck!