Moonfruit Lounge

The following article appeared on the Webuser blog recently in a group test of online website builders. Moonfruit received the Gold Award but we were also pleased to see that our partners came 2nd and 4th.

The full article in pdf format can be found here Moonfruit_Web_User_review_Aug_2011121.pdf while the review of Moonfruit is reproduced below:

Moonfruit ❘ ★★★★★

If you’re looking for a simple way to put together a website that looks like it’s been designed by a professional, Moonfruit leads the way. Its attractive website isn’t just a shallow bid to get you interested, but a genuine indication of the kind of site you’ll be able to create.

Considering the calibre of website it aims to produce, Moonfruit is amazingly easy to get started with. To begin the 15-day free trial, just register a username, email address, and a password. Click one of the eye-catching templates (there are 100, and every one of them looks great) and your website appears in front of your eyes, ready and waiting for your content. Click a text box to enter new text, or click an image to change it.

There are some elements, however, that you can’t immediately change. Moonfruit uses a master page, which acts as the base layer of your website. This holds the elements that appear on every page, such as the title and navigation. It’s a neat system, once you get your head around it, since it ensures key elements are identical on every page. This makes your website look coherent and well-designed.

The basic package costs £4 per month, for which you get 500MB of storage for a single website. The number of pages is unlimited, and you get 10GB per month of bandwidth. This is actually not a huge amount of space, but it ought to be enough to hold a modest website with plenty of content, and you won’t be restricted by the page count.

If you double your payments to £8 per month, you can have a domain, PayPal integration, twice the storage and bandwidth, and the ability to create five websites. If you’re feeling really ambitious, there are also £15- and £35-per-month packages available. The first offers 2.5GB of storage, 15 websites and unlimited bandwidth, while the ‘full-throttle’ package gets you 5GB of storage and a whopping 50 websites.

Verdict: Moonfruit has led the pack in offering attractively designed websites that are easy to set up. This latest incarnation is no different, and offers a collection of gorgeous templates to choose from and a good smattering of features to play around with. The site is split into two layers, so you can’t muck up the overall design by changing things on your various pages. If you find that adapting the templates is a bit tricky, there are blank ones available that let you start from scratch.

Price: From £4

Features: ★★★★★

Performance: ★★★★★

Ease of use: ★★★★

Value for money ★★★★

Overall ★★★★★

For the original Webuser page, please click here

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