Moonfruit is another service which has a free entry-level offering and a range of others moving right up to a business offering. The Standard product sits above Free and Lite variants and should suit most personal and entry-level commercial uses. See Group test: what's the best web-design software?
In many ways, this is what an online web design application should look like. It’s polished and slick, but still has nearly all the features you could want. Starting with a wide range of predesigned templates, all of which look clean and modern, it shows the full page on screen with a tool bar across the top and selection palette down the left hand side. Individual dialogs appear as tools are selected and everything happens in real time, as if the page were being edited locally. Take a look at Adobe Dreamweaver CS5.5 too.
The shop facilities are well integrated into the web design and you can enter each item for sale in a separate database screen, which includes facilities for options, such as colour or postage to different areas. Sale items can be categorised too, so you can list, for example, books, CDs and DVDs under different headings.
There are some other niceties not generally available in online designers, such as photo effects which open images onto the page with a little more pizzazz than just placing them there. There's a video player where you can link to YouTube and other providers and audio players for single tracks or a jukebox - potentially useful for a band website.
Connections to social media include Twitter and an RSS feed, and Facebook Connect enables visitors to log into your site using their Facebook credentials. Any site you create is also available in a mobile-friendly form, with all the graphics removed and the essential text displayed on your smartphone or tablet. Mobile visitors can still read all the content and even buy goods from the shop.
The only real shortcomings of Moonfruit Standard could be the storage allowance, which at 1GB is a lot lower than some of its rivals, and a bandwidth limit of 20GB, when most are unlimited. The nature of your site will determine whether either of these limits are going to present a problem.
Comments
Honor said: I find Moonfruit to be very easy to use once youve spent about a week fiddling about with it It may be difficult for a complete beginner but there are so many people with some experience now that finding a friend or relative to help you shouldnt be too hard I would advise trying a free version first seeing what you can do and then upgrading according to what you feel youre missing Ive built quite a few now and mostly on the free package No experience with the customer service but there do appear to be quite a few experts checking in on forums regularly
dow daytrader said: wwwwebstartscom works great free or pay ask about their beta site if you need an advanced form template AND u can pickup the phone and call yeeha answered by AMERICANS that SPEAK ENGLISHlots of flash toolsotherwise drop in html5 stuff since flash is fading away due to smartphones
Kprowerns said: to the Thanks other reviewers for saving me a lot of time amp money
Goalscic said: Spent a long timegetting the site just the way I want it even though its a very basicsiteBought a site name assuggested Pay for the pleasure ofputting it all together and it doesnt workPay for support thatdoesnt reply despite a number of requests and complaintsSave your time andmoney and DONT BELIEVE THE HYPE
Alice said: Its a cool concept and weve tried to make it work If you have something really simple it might be ok Service is really limited and not very fast Very buggy software But pretty sites and as long as you just want basic copy and paste youre fine If youre going to get into a lot of html snippets video newsletter forms etc youll see a bunch of problems All in all not a bad tool well continue to use just know the limitations