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Tuesday, June 22 2010

My Moonfruit Experience - by Simon Waller

SWLostI’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

Friday, April 16 2010

A month at Moonfruit

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