Moonfruit Website Builder Review

Posted by Charles on December 24th, 2008

We don’t do many product reviews on PiggyBankPie but every now and then I come across a product or service which is extremely helpful. In the past we’ve looked at the Dark Room text editor, a few paid to blog programs, and today it’s the website builder Moonfruit.

Website builders generally suffer from a multitude of problems. Usually they’re poorly developed, very inflexible, and only suitable for very basic sites. Frustrating is certainly a word that I’d use to describe them… all too often something as simple as adjusting the position of a button is impossible.

Yet for someone with limited technical web design skills (such as myself!) a good website builder would be extremely helpful but up until two monthx ago I’d actually given up looking for one. Then fortunately I stumbled across Moonfruit.

Why would you want to use a template builder?

You’re not going to use it to develop the next social media platform or a complex e-commerce site but DIY website builders can be extremely helpful in many situations:

An offline service which simply needs a web presence
A quick and cheap way to build specialist affiliate sites
An easy way to ‘test the water’ before taking the plunge to develop a more advanced site

What makes Moonfruit special?

Over other website builders I’ve tried Moonfruit is far and away the best when it comes to its versatility at accommodating particular layouts and positions for content and its ease of use. In all it’s a great choice because of:

Click and drag functionality, allowing text, buttons or images to be placed anywhere on a web page
Over 60 templates to choose from
Easy to use - it’s not necessary to read a manual or refer to the help section to build a site
Great value, even for the package where you can develop as many sites as you want

What does Moonfruit cost?

Initially there’s a 14 day free trial period, with no requirement to enter your bank details before or during this time (as so many free trials do), before you can choose from 5 packages:

Free package - completely free but adverts are displayed on your sites
Lite package - $4 a month, allowing you to build and host one site
Standard - this is the option that I chose. For $8.09 (GBP 5.39) per month you get one free domain name, up to 5 sites and a AdWords voucher of GBP 30.00
Plus Package - similar to the Standard option except that you’re allowed up to 10 sites
Max Package - unlimited number of sites, two free domains, and an AdWords voucher worth GBP 50.00 - all for just over $21 per month

Moonfruit in practice

I’ve been signed up to Moonfruit for around two months now and during that time have put together two affiliate sites. The first is Book-Eye-Test.co.uk, an affiliate site promoting half price eye tests, and the second is SamsungSteel.co.uk, another affiliate site but this time promoting one of Samsung’s popular mobile phones Samsung Steel.

Both sites are still work in progress but they do show what can be quickly put together, and if you’re building sites to promote affiliate offers then the AdWords voucher is a nice extra bonus.

Naturally there are limitations. I would never use Moonfruit for designing a site which I hoped to build into a business in its own right, but for quick affiliate sites and a basic web presence I haven’t come across any better choices.

Have you ever tried Moonfruit? How have you found their service and would you recommend any other website builders?

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6 Responses to “Moonfruit Website Builder Review”

Victoria Says:
January 22nd, 2009 at 4:16 pm
Great sites you’ve built with Moonfruit

It was interesting to note your sites are for affiliate sales but how did you work around the problem with Moon fruit being unable to support html ? Many moonfruit forum visitors are frustrated about not being able to add affiliate banners to their websites given Moonfruit is flash-based. You don’t seem to have had a problem incorporating affiliate links so how did you do it ? I’m interested as want to build a number of sites which can incorporate other affiliate links besides google adsense (clickbank products for example) yet no-one on the forum seems to have a clue how to do this and there is nothing on the help pages to tell us!
As far as I know you can’t copy and paste affiliate codes into Moonfruit sites as they don’t support html on the main body of the page, only around the edges which is where adsense ads go…..

I’d REALLY appreciate your help! And would pass it onto the forum as loads of people are wondering the same thing.
Charles Says:
January 24th, 2009 at 6:45 am
Hi Victoria,

I’m not sure I’ll be able to help too much unfortunately as I’ve never looked to incorporate banners into the sites. On both sites I’ve just gone down the route of adding buttons and links containing the affiliate code. I always prefer this approach as banners do suffer from incredibly low click-through rates.

To add these affiliate links I’ve just created buttons or links as normal but entered the affiliate code in there instead of a website address. Were you having trouble doing this?

One problem with Moonfruit that I have noticed is that on the home page there seems to be some kind of redirect which means that the Title Tag in indexed by Google as ‘Samsung Steel’ rather than ‘Samsung Steel L810 Mobile…’. Have you noticed this problem as well?
donna Says:
August 24th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
Hi - Has anyone solved this problem yet? I want to become an affiliate of TradeDoubler, but can’t incorporate the verification code into the Head tags? Very frustrating!!
Thanks
D
Neil Walsh Says:
June 16th, 2010 at 2:59 pm
Hi, its now actually possible to add HTML snippets to Moonfruit sites in the main body of the site. Just go to the ‘insert tab’ and the choice is available there. For example I just added a hit counter to my site:
http://www.qualitypencilportraits.com/
Vincent Connell Says:
March 23rd, 2011 at 5:39 am
Hi,

This HTML Snippit is great and adds possibility for a wide variety of functionality. However, I’m having a problem with positioning of the HTML Snippets. The HTML Snippets seem to have a “static” position. This would usually be fine but with moonruit all of the other controls have a “fixed” position.

It’s very hard to control the positioning of HTML Snippits and have them display in the same way on different browsers.

Has anybody else had this problem?
Yorkshire Website Design Says:
April 6th, 2011 at 9:38 am
Moonfruit is really good and I have seen some fantastic websites built with this Sitemaker software. We use Moonfruit for building sites for clients! also we provide a free SEO report for any websites. Visit our website for more info.