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Moonfruit Website Builder – Review Rating: 2.5 
Moonfruit is a great Website builder for making stylish websites in Flash. It has an advanced WYSIWYG editor and allows you to make different types of web pages. Moonfruit has the concept of Master pages wherein you edit a master page to change all your web pages. Moonfruit also ensures that your Flash site gets indexed by search engines. It piggybacks on the e-commerce tools of PayPal. There are five different packages and you can choose a package as per your budget.
Moonfruit Home Page
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· Easily recognizable toolbar and icons
· Facility to create your own animation
· Facility to create master pages
· Four cost-effective pages, including a free one
· Easy upload of images
· No advertisements
· Free 14-day trial offer
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· Absence of pre-formatted layouts
· Small image library
· No HTML editor
· No advertising credits
· No e-commerce tools of its own
· No e-mail address
User Friendliness
Rating: 2.5
Moonfruit is an average Website builder when it comes to its user friendliness. A toolbar is always visible on the top. In the initial stages, you will have to spend time understanding buttons and icons. However, once you get familiar, you will find things easy. The best part is that the editor does not appear on a separate page. However, there is no HTML editor.
Toolbar with familiar icons
Image library could have been made much better. In the absence of well-defined categories, you will spend a considerable time in checking each folder. However, it is very easy to upload images. Moonfruit prompts you to save your Web page every time you switch pages or view the Web site. Moonfruit does not automatically log you out. This saves the trouble of logging in again and again. Instead of templates, Moonfruit has master pages. By changing the master page, you can change the look and feel of all Web pages. Setting up a store is least user-friendly. Even for adding one product, you will have to spend more than 5 minutes.
There are no video tutorials. Just a 4-step tour is there. There is no telephonic support. The presence of five different packages only adds to confusion. All the higher packages seem to offer the same sets of functionalities with minor additions.
Designing tools
Rating: 2.5
Surprisingly, Moonfruit does not come with any template, though it is possible to perform limited customization globally through the master pages. Every change that you make on the master page gets reflected on all the pages. The thing that you will definitely appreciate is the ability to insert a logo and to display your company name in different color gradients. Another good thing is that Moonfruit has some pre-built logos. However, the designs of these logos do not look professional. However, you cannot change the body font, title font, background, menu, loading bar, page master, size & margins, and border globally. For doing that, you will need to edit the design of each page.
Edit the design of each page individually
Finding your way through the image library is very cumbersome. Although at the outset you will see lots of folders, there are only two folders which contain images. To make the matters worse, the images are not categorized. Therefore, you will be required to read the filename of each image.
Adding content at the bottom of the page is a pain too. Typically, you would expect a Web page to automatically increase in height as you add stuff to your page. However, this does not happen in Moonfruit. You manually need to increase the size of your Web page in the editor.
Editing tools
Rating: 4
Moonfruit has a simple and easy-to-use WYSIWYG editor. This editor is not a separate page but it sits on the top of each page as a dock able window. The tabs on the editor change depending on whether you are editing the text or images. You can bold, italicize, and underline the text. You can also change alignment options and colors. What is unique about Moonfruit is that you can give different effects to your text and images. There are lots of effects to choose from ranging from simple fly in to classy fade in. You can perform drag-and-drop operations with objects and text boxes. In addition, you can resize them on the fly. You can create many types of links using Moonfruit.
Easy-to-use editor
When it comes to uploading images, Moonfruit has definitely an upper edge over other Website builders. You can upload one more than image in one go. After uploading your images, you can literally play with them by rotating them or by adding ALT tags so as to make them accessible. You can also crop your uploaded images.
However, Moonfruit will definitely drive away those Web designers who like to write HTML code from scratch. This is because there is no code view.
Promotional tools
Rating: 2
Websites built with Moonfruit use Flash on each page. Most of the search engines do not index Flash pages. However, you do not have to worry a lot because Moonfruit has a solution for it. A copy of the entire Flash content is also kept in a separate HTML tag.
There are no articles on Website promotional strategies, which is quite unusual. Every Web designer, irrespective of his or her level of experience, needs some kind of information to market the Web site better. However, there is a solace in the form of monthly submission to Google. If you want to submit your site to other search engines, you will have to do it manually for each search engine. Another nicety form Moonfruit is the ability to specify description and keywords for your Website. However, no help is given as to how you should write the description and keywords. This help should have been provided as entering wrong keywords or repeating the same keyword can make your site invisible to search engines. The description tag is also important and without any expert advice, you cannot think of a good description for your Web site. Besides this, the presence of Site email address field is only going to confuse the site designer.
Enter keywords and description
E-commerce tools
Rating: 1.5
If you want to set up a store on your Website, you should rather avoid Moonfruit. Moonfruit does not have its own e-commerce tools. Rather, it handles everything through Paypal. Even then, the process is not easy.
Even for adding a catalog, you will have to wade your way through a myriad of confusing steps. You start off by creating a PayPal account. Then you select an image for your product. After that you add different buttons. For each button, you need to provide a link to PayPal. For each link, you need to select the type of button and then enter the product name and product price. Creating a product takes time. You cannot enter multiple products in one go.
You have to compulsorily use PayPal’s shopping cart. You cannot set up shipping or tax zones with Moonfruit. All these things are handled in PayPal. You cannot accept payments through credit cards. PayPal is the only way to realize your payments.
Other Features
Rating: 4
Compared to other Website builders, Moonfruit has few types of Web pages. The pages that you can add apart from normal pages include directory, event calendar, message board, and gallery pages. If you want visitors to participate, you can add a polling box to your Web page. It does not stop at that. It also allows visitors to create their own blogs. Blog management with Moonfruit is easy.
If you organization has something to do with music, then Moonfruit should be your Website builder of choice. This is because it allows you to insert music to pages individually or to the entire Web site. High-resolution and large images can take up a large amount of Web space. Moonfruit solves this problem by image compression.
An added feature of Moonfruit is the ability to set up groups. You can set up a group and then assign permissions. All the members belonging to a particular group can be restricted from accessing certain pages. However, password-protection of pages would have served the security purpose better.
Set up page permissions
Support
Rating: 2
The only good part about Moonfruit support is its welcome mail. Support is very lousy in Moonfruit. You cannot call up the support personnel. In online documentation, you expect to find a TOC with content grouped into categories. You also expect to find topics explaining the functionality. However, the online documentation that comes with Moonfruit contains only questions and that too listed in alphabetical order. The answers to these questions also lead you nowhere. You also face difficulty in performing your tasks using documentation because there are no screenshots.
Frequently answered questions
If you do not find your answer after reading the relevant questions, you can submit a support question to get your answer by e-mail. It takes time for the answer to come. The answer, when it comes, just asks you to read the relevant question.
Overall Value
Rating: 3.5
One of the chief advantages of using Moonfruit is that it offers you five different packages. There is an unlimited no-frills free package that allows you to have 20 MB of Web space. This package allows you to create a maximum of 15 pages while other packages allow you to create unlimited Web pages. There is the Lite package at $4.49 per month. It offers you 50 MB of Web space. However, you cannot set up a store with Lite package. The Standard package costs $8.99 per month. It is bundled with e-commerce tools and you get 250 MB of Web space. The Plus package offers more storage space and higher bandwidth while the Max package offers maximum storage space and highest bandwidth. Right now, Max is available at the discounted price of $19.19.
The prices are reasonable considering the functionalities that Moonfruit provides. However, it will be difficult to recover your investment quickly. This is because Moonfruit does not have its own e-commerce interface and the products do not get listed on shopping sites. In addition, you get a 25% discount if you opt for the annual plan. If you are extra cautious, you can opt for the 14-day free trial. The disadvantage is that you e-commerce tools are not activated in the free trial.
Technical Details
Rating: 3
Moonfruit does not offer a free domain name with any of the packages. You will have to pay extra for the domain name. However, there are no set-up fees. The higher packages allow you to create more than one site in Moonfruit. It does not provide any free e-mail address. Your Web store can contain unlimited products. Moonfruit does not have its own shopping cart. Customers can pay for the products by using credit cards. There are no transaction fees. You have the flexibility to use merchant accounts. You do not get any advertising credits in any of the packages. There are no design templates. Customer support is provided to you free of cost. You can add music to the Web pages. The image library has 195 images. Moonfruit builds your Websites in Flash. It uses a lot of widgets. In all the packages, you will find documentation. You can view site statistics. Max package offers you 1GB of Web space while a free package offers you only 5MB of Web space. The monthly bandwidth you get in free package is 1GB while you get 6GB, 10GB, 15GB, and 30GB bandwidth in Lite, Standard, Plus, and Max packages.
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