Moonfruit Lounge

Great News! Moonfruit acquired by Yell

Wendy — Wed, 16 May 2012 10:28:00 +0100

Firsts things first. To all our wonderful customers, don't worry, we're not going anywhere! The Moonfruit you know and love will continue to be run by the Moonfruit team you know and love, but as part of a bigger group. Our product roadmap delivery will continue, and may even accelerate as Yell recognises the exciting things going on here and want to support and invest in that growth. And, as the team that founded Moonfruit, we'll be sticking around too and we are all really excited about what's to come both within Moonfruit and within Yell.

We founded Moonfruit in 1999 as a place to “share your passions” online. We wanted to democratise publishing on the web for small businesses and individuals. The last 12 years have flown by. Those of you who have followed our story know that like many small businesses before us, the path from startup to growth business has not always been a straight-forward one. The one thing we are sure of is this: it's our customers and community that have made us who we are and helped us grow rapidly in the past few years.

So far nearly 5 million websites and 230,000 shops have been built using Moonfruit. Over 500k people are currently using Moonfruit: 60% in the UK, 33% in the US and 7% in the Rest of the World. Millions more browse, transact and link to Moonfruit sites, together with our 18k twitter followers and 10k Facebook fans, the team here is proud to be part of the Moonfruit community.

We have been looking at the best way to accelerate providing our services to a bigger global SMB (Small Medium Business) audience and were heartened at the number of big SMB players in the US who became very interested in partnering with us. In fact so interested that they proposed "getting married" or I really should say, acquired (for those of you who have organised and negotiated around a wedding it's a similarly harrowing and joyful experience!)

So after discussion with several attractive and not so attractive suitors I'm very excited to announce we accepted a "proposal" from Yell Group and are excited to announce our marriage! Yell is a leading provider of digital services within the emerging local eMarketplace for consumers and SMBs across its operations in the UK, US, Spain and some countries in Latin America. Yell has 1.3m small business customers and earned £2bn in revenue in 2011, supported by 13,000 employees around the world and, most importantly for us, is an entrepreneurial corporate with the commitment to being a true global digital service provider which will better serve SMBs. Together we can provide better tools and services to help customers build and grow their businesses on web, mobile and social platforms.

Yell has made it very clear they are not just buying Moonfruit for its products and customers but for the Moonfruit team itself. There is a commitment to keep the team at Moonfruit together to continue innovating current and new digital products. Moonfruit will continue to run as a sub-brand of Yell.

We're committed to carry on providing an open and transparent service to our customers and to continue innovating with their input and support. With Yell’s resources and support behind us we will be able to provide additional services to help grow our customer businesses.

We love providing people with simple, design-led tools which allow anyone to create a great looking and effective website or shop. We've continued to listen to our customers and innovate our products. Our latest "light" ShopBuilder makes it super simple for small businesses to design, curate and publish an online shop simultaneously on the web, mobile and Facebook. And we're making our final steps to migrating fully to HTML 5. All our sites will render in HTML 5 on the iPad (for one) later in 2012, building on our mobile sites and Facebook shops which are already published in HTML 5.

We look forward to continuing our journey with you and helping your businesses flourish.

Many thanks

Wendy-Tan-White CEO and Co-Founder

PS. Here's what TechCrunch had to say about the Yell acquisition of Moonfruit

HTML5 Update

Joe — Tue, 08 May 2012 10:38:00 +0100

There's been some exciting progress on the HTLM5 site publishing project. The black ops dev team have been squirreling away to rewrite how your sites are published and adding in, bit by bit, the features to support full HTML5 site views.

The story so far

Just to recap, we started work on this in 2010, by rewriting the way we stored your site contents, e.g. text, images, links, etc. We wanted to abstract the content from the design so we could choose to display the sites differently for different platforms. The first task was mobile displays using HTML5, which we did in Mar 2011, and then updated last month with our new mobile editor, giving you greater design and layout flexibility for the mobile version.

Mobile editor in action

But the biggest bit of work has always been the full site HTML5. Not only was it a more complicated job to make the sites identical in Flash and HTML, but we also wanted to wait for HTML5 to be more widely adopted to ensure a consistent experience for your visitors (as it is only fully supported on the most modern browsers). In January we showed you a preview of sites in HTML5, and showed you how this compared to Flash, and now automating this process for all sites is starting to come together.

How it will work

Pretty much the same. The great thing is that the edit tools you know and love will stay exactly the same. You will continue to edit your sites using our existing software, but we'll add the ability to publish the end result in HTML5, rather than the usual Flash. As we highlighted in the first article, some elements may need some tweaking by you (e.g. Fonts) to ensure they will look the same in each environment, but once that's done the experience will be the same in HTML5 from then onwards.

Where we are

We've tied together the editor with some of the core elements of a webpage which are now showing in HTML5 rather than Flash. This includes, text, images, some graphic elements and the page structure itself. Here's a little video of how it's currently working and some of the things you can do.

Here's a screen grabs of the same site on an iPad. So you can see it's very much the same :-)

IPad view in HTML5

But there's still a way to go, which is why this won't be released until later in the year, with end Q3 our target. We've got to tie back in the menus, the blog, the shop, HTML widgets (shouldn't be too hard, they're HTML already!), and lots of other bits and pieces.

Many of you have asked about how this will affect the load time of sites, which should also be much faster as we'll share the hard work between our big servers and the HTML rendering skills of modern browsers. So great news there too. (You can see the difference in load time in the video).

So that's it for now. We'll tell you more when we've got more to show you, but we're super excited about these changes and working hard to get them to you as fast as we can!

Mobile Editor release!

leila — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:50:00 +0100

A lot of you have requested to have more control over how your site looks on mobile devices. For months now, our team have been working really hard on this feature and I’m pleased to announce that our mobile editor has now been launched!

As you know, our aim is to allow our customers to build their site once and publish it on all platforms i.e. computer, tablet and mobile. With the mobile editor, our code translates your website the way it sees best and then presents it on a mobile screen in your browser. You can then customise your site by changing colours, arranging the order of elements and providing the ability to hide and unhide elements on the page – giving you more control.

Here’s how it works in more detail:

Change the colour of your text and background to make your site stand out

Arrange your pictures/page elements in the order you would like them to be viewed by your visitors. This is more limited on the blog and shop pages, however, you can still play around with the elements on a page.

Hide and unhide elements on a page to make it more appealing.

All of this is part of our ongoing multi-platform strategy that truly allows you to 'publish once, be everywhere'. This is why we started seamlessly rebuilding the technology behind your site back in 2010, which will culminate towards the end of this year with the new HTML 5 full site publishing option. This mobile release is on that roadmap and adds a bit more zing to your mobile site, all in crisp new HTML 5.

What are you waiting for?! Take control of your mobile site today!

How to pivot your startup if necessary

Clare — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 09:54:00 +0100

This article was taken from the May 2012 issue of Wired magazine and features Wendy Tan White, founder of Moonfruit. Read the original article here.

Klaus Nyengaard had witnessed the success of desktop applications for PCs and predicted that the same would happen with mobile phones. So in 2000, he created marketplace Mobli, secured funding and amassed the world's second-largest portfolio of mobile apps. Mobli predicted exactly how the 3G smartphone market would develop. Its mistake was expecting it to develop five years sooner than it did. "If you read reports in 2000, people were talking about 3G being just around the corner. We'd have smartphones in two years," explains Nyengaard, who is now CEO of Just-Eat.com. It was another five years before there was enough 3G coverage to make it a viable business, and eight years before the launch of Apple's App Store. "It's just as bad being too early as it is too late," he muses. Mobli's prematurity, combined with the founders' bullish resistance to accepting funding that gave them a runway longer than six months, meant that their coffers ran dry and they had to close.

Too much funding can be just as damaging as too little. Not only does funding have to be paid back, often at a multiple, but it also makes entrepreneurs lose focus, as Wendy Tan White (right) discovered with website builder Moonfruit. "We went from seed to a few million in funding within six months," she says. "That wasn't enough time to learn who our market was and what core features people were interested in. You end up spending money on the wrong stuff." White then shrank the company from 60 to two people: "In the dark years we learned to generate our own income and adopted what's now called the lean startup model."

The delicate funding balance is made more precarious by the fact that everyone at the table ~~the VCs, angel investors, the CEO with phantom stock~~ is keen to make money out of you. School for Startups founder Doug Richard took other people's advice and sold his company Visual Software for shares instead of cash, which lost 99 per cent of their value within weeks. "Everyone has a different set of incentives. Nobody has your interest, so stop whining and make your own decisions," he says.

One of the most terrifying decisions you need to make is to quit the day job. "If you don't commit full-time, you won't have the impetus to go and find customers or raise capital," says Adil Abrar, director of Sidekick Studios. He built gaming platform Budge, which fizzled out because he ran another company. "There was no real incentive to make it work because our mortgage didn't depend on it."

Assertive decision-making is also critical when it comes to firing a misfit, as Simon Campbell took too long to discover with his web-applications company Conexia. Aged 23, he was dazzled by an experienced former Oracle salesman who had charisma and impressive contacts. The startup agreed to pay him more than everyone else in the hope that he'd make sales. After a month without signing anything, it became clear that he wasn't right for the job, but Campbell kept the faith that he'd come through. He never did, and tried to sue the company when it did ask him to leave three months later. Conexia didn't fail, but the incident zapped morale and set the business back by 12 months.

"Work out what's right for the business and what it can afford," Campbell explains. "If sales people want a massive base, there have to be question marks about what they will deliver. If you realise you have made a mistake, get rid of them as soon as you can."

Just as important as people is the place you start your business, as Luke Johnson, chairman of Risk Capital Partners, discovered when trying to launch mussels-and-frites restaurant chain Belgo in New York. "We completely underestimated the cultural and economic differences between the UK and America," he explains. "The restaurant business in New York is much more competitive than in the UK and with much lower expected returns." Two years and $5 million (£3 million) later, Johnson and his partners retreated from the US.

Even with the right timing, people, place and product, you're not immune from failure, as Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, discovered when he started Catalyst Recruiting out of his Yale dormitory. He explains: "We had a really beautiful business plan - with census data, market research, complicated models and strict customer-acquisition budgets. However, we just didn't know exactly who our customers were." Ries classifies his mistake as "achieving failure": being so focused on executing a plan that you don't ever pause to assess if it's good or not, thus wasting energy going in the wrong direction. The solution? To continually test the market and iterate.

A Successful Husband-Wife Team

Clare — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:28:00 +0000

This interview by Sramana Mitra first appeared in her blog. Part 1 of the interview is reproduced below but you can read the whole of it here.''

Wendy Tan White is the CEO of Moonfruit, a company she co-founded with Eirik Pettersen and Joe White. Moonfruit is an on-demand website development platform that allows anyone to develop a website for any purpose in a matter of minutes. Prior to Moonfruit, Wendy worked at Arthur Andersen as an IT consultant and helped establish Egg.com. Joe worked as a website developer while finishing college and completed projects for clients such as Disney and Egg.

Sramana: Let’s start by reviewing your personal backgrounds.

Wendy Tan White: I studied computer science at Imperial College in London. It was a great experience and a great college. I used to program really old assembly line systems, which is a far cry from where we are today. Both of my parents worked in IT, which was unusual in those days, especially for my mother. She worked for DEK in Reading, England.

After college I ended up working for Arthur Andersen. It was good commercial experience although it was not my passion. I ended up in a financial services IT consultancy. One of my first big career step came when one of my clients headhunted me to help set up the Internet bank Egg.com. It was the first UK Internet bank which came around in 1997. That is where I got the bug that led me to try and understand how communities work on the Internet. Initially I approached that from the perspective of banks, but I quickly started looking at how people shared their passions online. That is when I founded Moonfruit in 1999.

I was quite lucky that my boss at Egg told me that if I stayed around a bit longer, he would help seed the business, which he did. He also let me work part-time at Egg to give me the opportunity to get the business started while being able to maintain some income. He was a tremendous mentor.

Sramana: When you started Moonfruit, what was in your head?

Wendy Tan White: It has always been about democratization. As a developer, I realized that if someone wanted to publish something online, they could not do it themselves if they were not a developer. I wanted to give them a simple user interface to share their passion online. It did not matter to me if it was a hobby, business, or passion. These were the days before blogging and social media.

We ended up building something that was like a PowerPoint editor. It really was a SaaS product, which was not a common concept in those days. The idea was that it was a very literal editor. It was a visual editor to create a website.

Joe White: My story dovetails into this. I was at Cambridge getting an economics degree. In the summer I started working at a software company, which is where Wendy was in the graduate program. When she left that company to go to Egg, I was going back to my finals at Cambridge. One of the guys I met at that company was interested in setting up a web design agency in 1997. I told him that I was going back to school and that I could look for some clients with the intention of sharing the work with him if I were able to find some clients. The first client we got was The Big Issue, then we got the London School of Economics, Disney and a few others. By the time I graduated, we had a group of clients that included Egg.

I was traveling between London and Cambridge, balancing school and work. I got to know Wendy when I went to work on commissioned projects at Egg. Wendy was the one commissioning work to us. When Wendy decided she wanted to leave Egg to start Moonfruit she got me involved, along with Eirik, who is our other co-founder. This all occurred before we were married.

Wendy Tan White: Eirik Pettersen was my best friend from university. He was a physicist but would do programming on the side. We always talked about starting a business together in college but we ended up going our different ways after school. When we set up Moonfruit, I wanted him to come in as CTO, and Joe’s agency built the prototype that we went out and raised money with.

The Good Web Guide

Clare — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 09:56:00 +0000

The Good Web Guide asked Wendy Tan White, founder of Moonfruit, to share some of her favourite websites. See the article here.

Wendy Tan White is the founder and CEO of Moonfruit, a design-led DIY website builder company - "We do all the hard work so that you can be free to design your own website in just a few hours with no technical knowledge." Wendy's aim is to democratise the web and to this end, Moonfruit has just launched a Shopbuilder which means you can create your own shop which will publish to mobile and Facebook automatically. Since the launch in October 2011, over 60,000 shop sites have been developed and worldwide over 4 million websites have been created in the last 12 years, 1.5 million in the last 12 months. Wendy has won many awards but winning Entrepreneur of the Year at the CWT everywoman in Technology Awards in 2011 was a highlight.

As well as running Moonfruit, Wendy is mother to a 7-year-old and 4-year old. She lives in west London with Joe, her husband and the COO of Moonfruit.

WENDY'S FAVOURITE SITES

Designers Guild - When my home feels neglected (as it frequently does), I make it feel better by treating it to something bright and colourful from this stylish homeware shop. An antidote to greige!

Tech Crunch - The site that has all the up-to-date news and stories on the tech world including start-ups and investing.

Reuters - Another site which is excellent for all news as well as tech news - and (declaration of interest coming up) it includes a regular blog by Joe White.

Water Forward - A simple idea to provide fresh water for 1 billion people who don't yet have access. You can easily donate $10 using social media and to spread the word.

The Kernel - Edited by Milo Yiannopoulos, this site publishes high-quality writing about the way technology is rapidly changing our lives and is not afraid of debate, comment and controversy!

Hsaba - My father is Burmese so this blog is one of the many that I follow to source recipes and chat about Burmese life and food.

Pinterest - This online pinboard helps you to organise your life and to share the things you love: recipes, kids, photos, crafts, storage, motivational words and much much more.

"Business in You" - more than just hot air

Clare — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 15:44:00 +0000

Entrepreneurs and business owners need to fight their own cynicism towards government initiatives, argues Moonfruit.com co-founder Wendy Tan White in Real Business.

As co-founder of Moonfruit.com, I am supporting the government’s Start Up Britain initiative and its recent "Business In You" campaign – which aims to show there’s a business idea in everyone.

Now that I've gotten over the shock of seeing my face plastered on a billboard on the A4, I wanted to explain why these schemes are so important for entrepreneurs and growing businesses – as well as the UK economy in general.

Like most entrepreneurs, I am sceptical about “initiatives” for startups and SMEs, and fatigued by a glut of patronising “how-to” guides. Many corporate-led outreach programmes are CSR- or PR-driven; while there’s nothing wrong with this in itself, it means that support for new businesses is often one-way and short-term, and ceases once the case study is published. Like a one-time charity handout, it does little to support a new business in its ongoing growth and evolution. I like action!

So what’s different about "Business In You", and why have I laid cynicism aside?

Firstly, challenging economic times have necessitated a more symbiotic relationship between the government and UK businesses – of all sizes. While startups and SMEs still need the support of big corporations, larger companies can call on the agility and speed of smaller businesses. All businesses could do with the support of their government to help them be financially sustainable in difficult economic times.

In turn, the government needs the support of its businesses, particularly entrepreneurs. According to the Federation of Small Businesses, SMEs account for 99 per cent of all enterprise in the UK, and nearly two thirds of private-sector employment. Put simply, the government needs us to help boost the economy and fight increasing unemployment, so it is within its interests to create a support network that makes a difference way beyond a political gesture.

Increasingly, we all need a symbiotic business ecosystem to survive – a positive, supportive environment based on "pay-it-forward" goodwill. It is this ecosystem that makes Silicon Valley such a startup hotbed, where each service provider plays a part in an ongoing and collaborative success story.

I love the way lawyers and PR agencies are not afraid of putting skin in the game themselves and when one senior law partner stopped talking about time on the clock and warrants and instead about the "magic" in the valley I had to smile.

David Cameron’s Tech City speech last year suggested that Silicon Valley could provide a useful model for more entrepreneurial Britain. I was sceptical about Startup Britain when it launched, but I’ve experienced their positive ecosystem in action: at the recent launch of Moonfruit ShopBuilder, the outgoing StartUp Britain CEO and founder of Enterprise Nation Emma Jones spoke at the event, PayPal lent us their auditorium and both organisations promoted it to their communities. Some 150+ SMEs attended.

The government is also backing up its campaigns with a number of tangible measures. Its extension of the Enterprise Finance Guarantee System will help more businesses borrow the money they need, while the Startup Britain Marketplace aggregates offers, events and links for new businesses that are really designed to help.

The MentorMe matching site will find you a mentor and the initiative the PM seemed most keen on when I spoke to him was the freeing up of unused government office space to provide new businesses with variable, low cost working space.

It’s certainly a creative idea but logistically challenging. Partnering with experienced incubators/co-working spaces like TechHub, WhiteBearYard and Club Workspace would help turn this from an idea into reality, quickly. So while I understand why people could be cynical towards yet another “initiative”, I believe it’s up to us to take the steps to make sure "Business In You" is more than just hot air.

New Templates!

Walt — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 14:55:00 +0000

Templates

Our Design team have been busy and today we released five new templates (of which four are shop templates). Plus, we’ve also updated all the existing shop templates to include the new 'Variants' feature from the last release, as well as the 'Duplicate a Product' option.

The New Templates

While there are only five new templates in this round we’re continuing to create new and exciting templates to add to our already growing template portfolio. We hope you like them. And if there's a specific type of template you'd like to see please let us know.

Next release

Our developers are also hard at work on a number of projects including the key HTML5 project aimed for Q3.

But for the minute, the next project out the door will be our first version of the mobile editor. Just a reminder of what you can expect: it will permit mobile version styling (colours), allow you to include or exclude content from the mobile version and enable the re-ordering of content. And when is it out? Hopefully by the end of March - if testing goes well.

Your Say on the Shop

Finally, while our 'Next Features?' survey is gathering some fantastic feedback from our customers we’d like to get just a few more of you contributing your thoughts and votes on what we should develop next on the shop. Remember this is your chance to have a say on what you’d like to see us release next for the shop. So, don’t be shy, please give us your views by casting your vote in our quick and simple Shop survey.

And that's me for another blog.

Shop Update: Product Variants

Walt — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:42:00 +0000

Since October last year the ShopBuilder has gone from strength to strength and our customers have now built over 135,000 shops. There are already 168,552 products on sale. As Leila mentioned in an earlier blog we have been taking your recommendations on board for which features you'd like to see next and Product Variants (Options) came top of the list. Thanks to your feedback, today we pushed out an update that now allows you to apply variations to all your products e.g colour, range, size etc.

Variants

To update your shop to use variants, you need to use the update tab on the Editor for each ShopBuilder section. If you've not done this before it's very straightforward. Go to your shop page whilst logged in, click the shop on the page so it's highlighted and then go to the Editor. Click on the Update tab and click on the Update widget button. And then Save your page. You'll need to do this for the four sections (Product Catalog, Product Detail, Shopping Cart and Sale Confirmation) which you can work through using the drop down on the toolbar.

Getting the new updates is easy

Adding variations is also very easy. Go to your Product List on the Shop section and edit that product. You will now see a section in the middle called Product Options which allows you set up product options or variations up to a maximum of 50 per product.

How you set up variants within the Editor

So not only does this give you more flexibility over the products you sell, allow you to add one base product and offer a range of variations, but it also means, for example, that if you run a Standard account you can run a shop that offers up to 2500 different items or units for sale (50 products x 50 variations).

How your customers will see variants in action on your website

As with other features of the ShopBuilder, Product Variations will also appear on your Mobile Shop and your Facebook Shop (where they've been set up correctly).

Bonus

Now, for the eagle-eyed amongst you, who spotted the bonus feature?

We managed to sneak in Duplicate a Product to the release. This will make it easier for our shop builders to easily copy a product which you can then modify or adapt as you see fit on your Product List. Using the Edit drop-down for each product you can quickly copy a product into your Product List.

Duplicating an existing product is now very simple

So, what's next?

Well, the next release is very exciting and will see our first version of the mobile editor going out the door. The editor will give you access to mobile version styling (colours) and include/exclude content from the mobile version. For those of you who consider mobile technology to be a key channel to visitors accessing your sites, this tool will give you more control. Obviously the HTML5 work will provide even greater benefits but that won't hit the streets until Q3.

So, what's next for the shop? We've had some great feedback from our customers and we now wish to find out what the next most important feature is for you to have added to the ShopBuilder. We have selected the next top 3 requested features that we keep hearing again and again, but we'd like to get more specific feedback on what we build next. So if you want to have your say on what shop feature you'd like to see developed next please cast your vote in our quick and simple survey. So, over to you.

Lastly, what we have fixed!

We fixed a number of bugs in this release, many of which were minor. The headline bug fixes were:

Google Webmaster Tools verification code is again being added to the HTML
You can now scroll again in edit mode across all supported browsers
Facebook Shop image popup gallery is now working correctly again

And that's another release.

Online Content Editor

leila — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 10:07:00 +0000

We are looking for an Online Content Manager to join our team. Could this be you or do you know someone who will fit this role? Please check out the job description below.

Job description

Job title: Online Content Editor
Department: Marketing
Location: Eastcastle Street, London, W1W 8EA
Responsible to: Head of Digital Marketing

The package and perks

Salary according to qualifications and experience. Moonfruit offers generous benefits including annual bonus, private health care, pension scheme and 25 days holiday.

The company

Moonfruit.com is a small business that is growing fast. Having been around for over 10 years, it is now the market leader within the UK and is a real entrepreneurial success story. With the continuous goal of democratising web-design and ecommerce for everyone, Moonfruit.com provides design led DIY website and shop builder tools at an extremely low cost, providing accessibility to everyone.

The opportunity

The job of Online Content Editor will be primarily concerned around the website Moonfuit.com and additionally, our Shop and Sitebuilder products. The main audience focus will be sole enterprise, small businesses and other organisations that require low cost online coverage. Our audience is worldwide, however short-term we have a particular focus on the UK and America. This is expected to expand over time and become multi-lingual.

Job role and responsibility

In line with our brand guidelines and editorial brief, develop, build and manage our ongoing content strategy including research, sourcing, creation, editing and maintenance
In parallel with our development team, build a categorised content management process with a change control mechanism
Play a central and active role in all content related matters (projects and initiatives)
Create and update product/web/blog pages
Write articles and guides that can be used for both on-site and viral activities. Also support PR strategy and content creation
Use knowledge of SEO best practice to create effective content
Compile and organically evolve the Moonfruit content editorial guidelines
Absorb, understand and execute a style of writing representative of the Moonfruit image and brand values
Liaise directly with content and project stakeholders to ensure that material is produced in line with technical expectations
Enhance customer landing page conversions with effective messaging and CTAs
Through use of available online analytics, understand the value of content and change
Present and report upon content developments financial impact
Tailor content to support our partner activity
Where required, work with the CEO, COO and other company directors
Use external agency knowledge and resource to optimise content opportunity

The team

The Moonfruit.com team consists of web designers, developers, infrastructure & systems, testers, marketing and customer support.

Duties overview

Strategy in line with company and marketing goals
Process, management and change control
Creation of multi purpose/functional content for all Moonfruit channels and audiences
Timely delivery of content for projects and initiatives
Enhance marketing activity through content (SEO and conversions)
Content entrepreneurialism and creative thinking
Quality control (legal, brand guidelines, editorial guidelines)
Compliance (Intellectual Property, CAP codes)
Content ROI (Understanding the financial value of change)
Team and agency liaison

Skills, qualifications and experience

Educational level – Graduate or equivalent experience
Skills and experience
Online content strategy experience. Preferably in or for the small business area
Online editing experience. Preferably in or for the small business area
Experience of editing online content to optimise for SEO and usability
Good knowledge of consumer behaviour and best practice techniques for content conversion
Experience of developing and using content management systems (processes)
High standard of written and spoken English
First-class copy-editing and proof-reading skills
Good project-management skills
Good understanding of copyright law, plagiarism and related content legal issues

Personality and character

Self starting, team-player
Practical and efficient
Confident
Articulate
Adaptable
Careful, meticulous attention to detail
Excellent organiser and problem-solver
Able to prioritise
Ability to work calmly and effectively under pressure, handling multiple projects to tight deadlines

Some travel within the UK may be necessary from time to time

How to apply

To apply for this role please send a cover letter and a copy of your CV to jobs@moonfruit.com

Shopbuilder Showcase

leila — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:26:00 +0000

What a great year it's been. ShopBuilder was launched late last year and has been a great success. It's still very much in Beta but thanks to the feedback from our very awesome community, over the next few months, you should see even more requested updates.

As I've said before, we do listen to your feedback and sometimes your suggestions can take some time to develop, test and release. As an example, loads of you asked for shop variants as the next priority feature - we heard you! We are now in final testing and this should be in our February release, next week. If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact us via Twitter or Facebook. It's this kind of feedback that enables us to make our website building too easy for you to use.

Last year, after the blog launch, we showcased some of our nicest blogs. So, we thought it would be great to show off some of our ShopBuilder sites to help inspire you all. There are so many great shops that there's almost too many to choose from. But, here are some of our favourites. If you have a shop and would like us to take a look, please comment with your URL :)

www.whiteflowerfarmhouse.com

www.melijewelrydesign.com

www.cariadgifts.com

How To Optimize Your Facebook Shop For Valentines Day

Clare — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:45:00 +0000

This article by Joe White originally appeared in All Facebook

This year, the National Retail Federation projects that consumers are prepared to spend over 15.7 billion dollars in gifts this Valentine’s Day season, and with over 845 million monthly active users on Facebook, it’s time for shop owners on the network to take note.

With Valentine’s Day just under a week away, here are three ways to romanticize your Facebook shop and drive last-minute buyer traffic to your store in time to cash in on sales before the holiday.

Encourage Likes, Shares And Suggestions

Facebook’s natural format, optimized for sharing and suggesting serves as a perfect environment for both getting and giving gift ideas.

Shop owners can take advantage of the Facebook news feed to publish gift guides and package popular items as coordinated gifts for that special day, urging shoppers to connect and share their finds.

Additionally, shops can connect their Facebook shop to their main web site, linking users to published posts with content themed for the upcoming love day. .

Offer A Free Gift

For boyfriends, wives, fiancés, secret admirers and parents, Valentine’s Day is a cherished day for gift giving and as customers are looking to buy, they’re also looking for the best buy.

Offer shoppers an incentive to purchase from your storefront. Whether it’s an entry for a weekend trip to wine country, a 15 percent discount or simply free shipping for the customer — shoppers will be more inclined to purchase from your store.

For example, Méli Jewelry’s love-themed blog posts to Facebook and subsequent offer for free shipping through Valentine’s Day has already driven countless customers to purchase everything from watches to bracelets on its Facebook shop.

Design A Valentine’s Day Storefront

Draw in those rose-colored glasses and lovestruck shoppers with a themed storefront, recognizing the upcoming holiday and giving customers a virtual window-shopping experience.

Stores can utilize online site building and do-it-yourself design tools from numerous free storefront software providers to create a Valentine’s-themed microsite in a matter of minutes, producing a gift-giving guide for their Facebook storefront and planting their shop directly in consumers’ search feeds.

Shop owners have the opportunity to get creative with visual collage platforms such as Pinterest, to showcase suggested gifts for that special someone in a simple, eye-catching format.

Take advantage of this shopping occasion and give your Facebook shop a rosy tint this Valentine’s!

For the original article, click here

Domain Price Increases

Walt — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:00:00 +0000

Following price increases by two of the major domain registries (Verisign and Neustar) on 15 Jan and 1 Feb respectively, we have decided to increase the cost of buying, transferring and renewing a domain from 1 March, 2012. The prices will increase to £11.99 per year (including UK VAT where applicable), US$15.99, €13.99 and AUD$20.00 respectively. Our full price list of the current domains, currencies and prices available can be found at www.moonfruit.com/domains-pricing.

We have deferred passing on the price increases until 1 March to give our customers time to renew at current prices. You can easily renew your domains ahead of time and over multiple years (except for .uk domains which are restricted to 2 year renewals within 30 days of expiry by the registry: Nominet).

And remember, you still get a free domain voucher with SiteMaker Standard, two vouchers with the Plus account and three vouchers with the Max account. So these are now even better value. And with all of our domains you still get 5 free mailboxes, so we hope you still think it’s a good deal.

Easily Create a Website with Moonfruit

Clare — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:31:00 +0000

This article by Sam Cater originally appeared in AppStorm

Many tools and packages exist online to help people create websites with minimal effort and involvement. Of course, each one has their own strengths and weaknesses. Some are more aimed at creating blogs, while others are better for single-page info sites.

Moonfruit is another competitor in this market. It looks stylish, promises to be simple, and … you do want to create a new site, right? So what does it have to offer, and what are its pros and cons? Lets take a look…

Making Creativity Easy

Moonfruit is designed for people with absolutely no web design experience. It attempts to give small business owners and individuals easy access to web management and creative tools. So without further ado, lets take a look at the site itself.

Choosing a template to work with

The first step in creating a site is choosing one of hundreds of themes as a starting point. From there it’s a case of altering and tweaking pretty much everything you see into a website that you would use to represent yourself.

The tools in the editor are very simple and easy to use, which is great because that’s exactly what people need. The elements, contents and formatting can be added and removed in a way that resembles Word or Publisher, so most people will feel comfortable using it. Moonfruit effectively turns a website into a page-by-page online document, where everything you see is configurable and can be adjusted as required.

The Editor window - More tools are made visible by selecting the categories at the top.

The content of the site has been intelligently and automatically mobile optimized.

A very useful feature Moonfruit has is automatic optimization of your site for mobile viewers. You don’t even have to configure or enable this, it’s there from the word go, no plugins, or code to meddle with. It didn’t show the Gallery image you can in these screenshots, however I am sure that this is solvable. Mobile-optimization is important these days, as with the growth of smartphone and tablet computer popularity, more and more views may come from such devices.

Another factor that would definitely make Moonfruit appealing to people who want a hassle-free experience is that the hosting and domain settings are handled for you. No FTP client is required, and there are no HTML or CSS files to manage. The web interface handles it all. On the subject of domains, you can link one you own to Moonfruit in a matter of minutes. They guide you through the process of changing address records with the company you purchased the domain from and so forth. You can also use Moonfruit to register a new domain if you so wished.

The social aspect of a websites? They are included too, with Twitter integration, RSS feeds, comment boxes, forum backends, and chat widgets.

Costs?

Free website? Why thank you, yes.

They start you out on a 15 Day Free trial with 20MB of storage space. For any more space than this you have to crack open your wallet.

I chose the trial at first, and was expecting to have a really restricted interface and being prompted to pay for extra features. However when I signed in a popup box asked if I wanted to continue my 15 day trial, or keep a site for free. I clicked free, and the only condition is that I have to sign in every six months to keep the site ‘active’. Seemed like a good deal to me.

Obviously if you want a site for small businesses and enterprises you are going to have to break the 20MB limit, but for individuals or small groups it seems you can have a website on Moonfruit for nothing.

Bolt-ons

There are several pieces of functionality you can add into your website if so required, such as a blog, or even a shop.

Blogs

The blog interface is very simplistic, offering only minimal functionality. What you see in this screenshot is all that you get. However for those of you familiar with feature-rich WordPress, remember that this entire service is geared towards people looking for straightforwardness and simplicity. Whilst it may look pretty bare, this is all that a blogger really needs. Three design modes are offered, Text, Image, and Article, so it definitely won’t be replacing WordPress any time soon.

For the original article, please click here

How to survive a crisis

Clare — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:20:00 +0000

This article by Emma Haslett originally appeared in Management Today

It can be hard to stay in calm control through economic turbulence. As Rudyard Kipling wrote: 'If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs ... yours is the earth and everything that's in it.' That's more easily said than done. But, in his book Managing Through Turbulent Times, Anthony Holmes says it's important to distinguish between a crisis and a problem: 'A problem is straightforward, while a crisis changes and evolves.' So how do you keep a zen frame of mind even when your business is suffering?

Admit defeat

When things start to go pear-shaped, it's easy to hum loudly and hope the problem goes away. And denial may not come just from you. Wendy Tan White, CEO of website builder Moonfruit and seasoned crisis survivor, says that in the run-up to the original dotcom crash her business model clearly wasn't working, yet her investors put her under pressure not to change tack. The sooner you react to what's happening, the easier it is to work on a solution.

Look after number one

By its very nature, a crisis causes panic, so the first challenge is to think clearly. Often, your instinct is to keep pushing until you find a solution, but the best course might be to remove yourself from the situation - even if that means just taking a walk around the block. As the person in charge, says Tan White, it's important to look after yourself. 'Put your own lifejacket on first, keep your head clear, then you can look after everyone else. There's no honour in going down with a sinking ship.'

Phone a friend

When your livelihood is under threat, it's hard to look at a crisis objectively. If you're emotionally invested in something, it is difficult to set your feelings aside. If you find yourself at a loss for ideas, call for outside help: a friend, mentor or coach - one whose judgement you trust and who might have experienced a similar situation and can calmly talk you through your options.

Plan ahead

When you're up against it and your team is thinking with all the rationality of a cornered animal, this is easier said than done. Even in mid-crisis, though, planning is essential. Anthony Holmes says: 'You will need a well-thought-out plan B. It might not be as good as plan A, but if plan A isn't working, move on immediately. And the moment you do that, go away and work out plan C.' Jenny Irvine, chief executive of the Pure Package, adds that planning for the worst-case scenario often covers all eventualities. She had planned for her business to be 'burnt to the ground', she recalls, so when some laptops were stolen, it didn't present a problem.

Communicate

When your business runs into trouble, don't beat about the bush, because once the rumours start, they will serve only to erode your employees' morale. The more open you are with your staff about what is going on, the better they will respond and the more empowered they will feel. Try to keep staff informed in advance about what their roles will be when a crisis hits. 'It is about knowing who is in charge,' says Irvine. 'People need to know whose job it is to step up and find solutions.'

Look for opportunities

They say every cloud has a silver lining - which is worth keeping in mind as 2012 shapes up to be ever-more financially taxing for businesses. But as your competitors slash their costs, keep your eye on the future and don't stop innovating. During the previous recession, many businesses dutifully battened down the hatches, only to find that when things improved, their competitors had outmanoeuvred them. One company's crisis can be another's golden opportunity.

Don't live in the past

The most important thing to remember is that you cannot turn back the clock. A genuine crisis isn't a temporary blip - it will change your business forever. As Holmes explains: 'You can't drive a car forward looking through the rear-view mirror.'

For the rest of the article, click here

Moonfruit sites to be published in HTML5!

Joe — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 10:16:00 +0000

As many of you know, there's been lots of talk about HTML5 being the standard for web development of the future. The exciting thing about HTML5 is that it allows the kind of design customisation (embedded fonts, vector drawing, etc.) that in ye old days was only possible using Flash. Design is very close to our hearts here at Moonfruit, so Flash was our original choice of technology precisely because it could create the kind of visually stunning sites that we liked and that we knew you would like.

But times, they are a changin'. Now that HTML5 has the design capabilities to match the richness of Moonfruit websites, and has a wide enough adoption (it is only viewable in the most modern browsers), we're ready to take it on! As you know we've been working in HTML5 for our mobile and Facebook versions of sites, so this web version will be an extension of that, but take it far beyond.

So later this year, we will be updating Moonfruit so that sites can be published in HTML5 for web and tablets (though you'll be able to keep the Flash version if you want).

And this is what it will look like as our example site goes from Flash to HTML5 (watch closely!)

Spot the difference

Flash version

HTML version

www.moonfruit.com/html5/

Yes, you spotted it, the font changes slightly. This highlights one of the lingering issues with HTML5 is that fonts are treated slightly differently than in Flash. This is something that we will be working on, but may be one area you'll need to tweak if you want to use the HTML5 version for your site.

So when's it coming? We would expect the HTML5 site display to ship in Q3 this year, after the summer. We've been working towards this for quite a long time now with changes having begun in 2010 to reorganise the way we store data about your site so that we could choose to display it in different formats for web, mobile and Facebook. The HTML5 site display will be the another point on our journey to 'publish once, be everywhere'.

So to recap. In Q3 2012 Moonfruit users will have the option to display their sites in HTML5 by default. New sites from this time will automatically be displayed in HTML5. We've made this decision because HTML5 is the future of web development, and now supports the richness we need for beautiful Moonfruit websites.

Enjoy!

Top 100 Influencers in Social Media – Wendy Tan-White ranked as #31

Clare — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:58:00 +0000

This article by Bonnie Boglioli-Randall originally appeared in Social Technology Review

31. Wendy Tan White- Veteran founder in the digital space, Tan White founded Moonfruit, the UK’s number one website builder making significant inroads in the U.S. market. She is a mentor with 500startups, a startup accelerator program, and leverages her extensive experience to guide new companies in business development, e-commerce, design, PR, fundraising and more.

32. John Batelle- What do you get when you mash up a co-founding editor of Wired Magazine, professor, publisher and best-selling author? Someone who would be named John Batelle, Chairman of Federated Media Publishing. Founding and presiding over the next-gen publishing house, Batelle continues to disrupt the space by leveraging the digital ecosystem, building conversation around a product and measuring engagement. In his free time, you can be sure to find him dishing his prolific thoughts to any number of media outlets and making the conference rounds. You might also catch him receiving any number of awards, most recently from the World Economic Forum as ‘Global Leader for Tomorrow’.

33. Jolie O’Dell- Technology journalist (a nom de plume in case you’re wondering), got her big break covering the tech industry for Mashable. Today, O’Dell covers the sector for VentureBeat and offers up her decade’s worth of insight and a healthy dose of computer literacy (she’s a computer science student in her spare time). From web startups and mobile apps to conversations with Vint Cerf (yes, that Vint Cerf) and more, O’Dell dishes up multiple articles each day to keep you in the know.

34. Chris Brogan- Brogan is a New York Times bestselling author and speaker who puts his knowledge of digital media to unique use. As President of Human Business Works, Brogan works closely with large corporations to implement social media strategies that make a difference. If judging on clients alone, he’s helped some big fish like Microsoft, Ford and Cisco. Brogan is also well-noted for co-founding PodCamp, a crowd sourced gathering of new media stakeholders who participate in so-called ‘unconferences’ at cities around the world from the U.S. and Canada to the U.K., Australia and Denmark.

To read the original article and see the rest of the list, please click here

Help For Small Business As Cameron Launches “Business In You”

Clare — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:49:00 +0000

This article by Jemma Porter originally appeared in PABNews.

UK – The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills has launched a national campaign called “Business In You” in an attempt to try and get UK people to turn their dreams into reality.

The entrepreneurial push is based on the concept that there is “a business in everyone” and to encourage millions of people to start their own small businesses.

The campaign, which was launched in Leeds by UK Prime Minister David Cameron, will see the Government work in partnership with the private sector in order to support small businesses that want to grow and help entrepreneurs kick start their ideas.

In order to inspire people, the campaign has teamed up with nine of the UK’s most successful business owners including Wendy Tan-White co-founder of Moonfruit and Richard Moross head of Moo. The partners will offer free online seminars, video tutorials, workshops, and face-to-face sessions.

In an attempt to stir up motivation in the UK’s budding entrepreneurs David Cameron said that the government is determined to do everything to help small businesses start up this year. He went on to say that he wants people to fulfil their business dreams in 2012.

Business In You will advertise the initiative by advertising real-life case studies of the successful business partners. Moonfruit.com has been selected as one of the businesses to front the marketing campaign as it is still currently in the growth stage itself.

Startup Britain has plans for the Business In You campaign to influence at least one million people over the next three years. This target may prove difficult to reach as there is no budget for television advertising. Hopefully the association with major businesses in the UK will help spread the word about the initiative.

Moonfruit is the UK’s leading DIY website builder, it is now home to more than 4 million websites around the world, with hundreds of thousands of them being located in the UK. The company’s CEO and co-founder Wendy Tan-White said that the idea behind Business In You was a part of the make up of Moonfruit, as it is passionate about helping UK small business owners start trading on a wider scale.

To see the original article, please click here

Wendy Tan White helps you find the 'Business in You'

leila — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:42:00 +0000

At Moonfruit, one of our biggest aims is to help small businesses get online easily. So who better than our very own CEO, Wendy Tan White, to be one of the faces of the new Government Campaign 'Business in You'.

Business in You is a major new campaign from the Government, in conjunction with the private sector, to encourage UK businesses to start up successfully and grow. Their aim is to ensure that small businesses have the resources and support to help them grow and expand over the next few years. The initiative will offer workshops, web-based seminars, video tutorials and some free services from partners.

Wendy was with the Prime Minister, David Cameron, at the launch of the campaign in Yorkshire on Monday. The day of the launch was Chinese New Year and Wendy presented the PM with a Chinese Calendar and mentioned that the year of the Dragon brings the opportunity for great success or great failure. Both agreed that they are gunning for the former!

Wendy will be one of the featured entrepreneurs on their nationwide poster campaign, alongside Richard Moross (our friends Moo.com) and Paul Lindley (Founder of organic baby food, Ella's Kitchen). You can see what Wendy has to say about how she set up Moonfruit and her top tips for anyone starting out - Wendy's Interview.

So, if you're in the UK, look out for the campaign!

Moonfruit meets the Prime Minister

leila — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:31:00 +0000

24th January, London – Moonfruit.com, the UK’s largest DIY website builder, is one of the first businesses selected to take part in a major new campaign by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills. The campaign is aimed at inspiring people to start or grow their own business. Based on the concept that there is "a business in everyone" and that all businesses can realise their ambitions, the campaign, launched by the Prime Minister in Yorkshire yesterday, sees the Government and the private sector coming together to highlight the support available to small firms and budding entrepreneurs.

The campaign partners will be providing free services such as workshops, web-based seminars and video tutorials on issues like finance, as well as providing mentoring and access to face-to-face consultancy sessions.

Throughout 2012, the “Business in You” initiative will showcase Moonfruit and other real-life small and growth stage business owner case studies, rolled-out using a nationwide advertising campaign, to ensure maximum visibility to small businesses who stand to benefit most from the initiative.

As a growth stage business itself, Moonfruit.com was selected as one of three businesses headlining the campaign on billboards and digital media - http://businessinyou.bis.gov.uk/casestudies/wendy-tan-white/ .

Moonfruit is well placed to support this initiative as the company is passionate about democratising the web for SMBs and entrepreneurs. It gives them the tools to build their business and promote it via the web, mobile and Facebook, allowing them to reach a global audience.

Since its inception, Moonfruit has enabled people to build more than four million websites worldwide and hosts hundreds of thousands of UK business websites enabling them to trade and win business online.

Wendy Tan-White, Moonfruit’s CEO and co-founder states, “The campaign encourages people to start and grow their own businesses, thereby boosting the UK economy, it’s very much part of Moonfruit’s DNA. We feel touched to be part of the BIS, Startup Britain campaign and very much support it.”

She continues, “Political cynicism aside, chatting to the Prime Minister yesterday was inspiring. Watching him take the time to talk to small business owners, students and staff makes you realise the steps we all take as individuals will make the difference in shifting the economy. We need to create a collaborative eco-system here in the UK where large corporations partner and support SMBs, consumers support small and local businesses and more serial entrepreneurs share their wisdom with new and growth businesses. Rather than being cynical when we see people trying out new business ideas, let’s support them. I mentioned to the Prime Minister yesterday it’s Chinese New Year, Year of the Dragon, auspicious for business and brings either great success or failure. We’re all gunning for the former.”

At the launch, David Cameron said, "Small businesses and entrepreneurs are the lifeblood of the British economy and I am determined that we, working with the private sector, do everything we can to help them to start up and to grow in 2012. I want to encourage people to go for it and make this the year of enterprise – whether that is fulfilling their dream of starting a new business or taking the leap to grow their business, to employ more staff, or to start exporting."

In further action to help small businesses get off the ground, the Prime Minister will also announce plans to make empty and under-used Government offices available to small businesses so that they can start up and grow. With over 300 buildings currently in the central Government estate with vacant space available in England, the Government will offer as much of this space as possible to small businesses, giving them space to grow at a low cost.