Creating your Moonfruit account is easy, and works much like most other web hosting options: enter your email, a username and password, or sign up directly using your Facebook or Google accounts. Follow up by choosing your preferred Moonfruit subdomain (yourname.moonfruit.com) and once you’ve verified your email address, you're taken directly to the editor, which almost looks like a blank page.
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There’s a section for the Header, one for the Footer, and a middle section to design your page. But where are all the elements you need to start building? If you're hoping for an instant site you can modify and use right away, there's a good chance you'll be disappointed. There’s a sidebar to the left which reveals options to add more pages to your site, insert new sections to an existing page, and an upload feature to include files to your site.
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Plans and pricing
Moonfruit has two main web hosting plans on their website. Plans come with a 14 day free trial, so you can test out the templates and build your site before committing to a paid plan. Here’s a quick overview of both main hosting plans:
The Basic plan costs $7.56 per month. It includes one website with unlimited pages, 500MB of storage space, and the ability to connect your own domain name. Unfortunately, this plan does come with Moonfruit advertisements so you’ll have to upgrade to the next plan to get rid of those. This plan is great for personal use and small businesses.
The Professional plan costs $6.39 per month which is a really good deal (right now, this plan is 50% off). You’ll have access to up to five websites with unlimited pages, 10GB of storage, and no Moonfruit ads. This plan is great for anyone looking to build multiple websites with more storage and is currently on sale.
Interface
You can preview any of the templates directly on Moonfruit’s website. It’s really easy to navigate to the template section and take a look at the formatting of previous websites to get a better idea of what your will look like. There are eye-catching Hero sections (an important element to highlight a key feature of the site), page bodies in various styles, navigation tools, and layout sections which organize your content in various column formats. Drag one you like to the main section of your blank site. It’s then ready for you to customize it.
Features
The editor is very easy to use. Not happy with that button caption? Double-click it, type a new one, press Enter. You can edit the contents of text boxes in much the same way, including changing text styles and colors, inserting lists and adding links. The editor does have many integrated ways to tweak each object. Even a simple button allows customizing text style, size, color, hover color, button shape, border style, link type and destination (new or same window).
You’re able to drag new objects to your page via that menu: text, images, galleries, buttons, video (YouTube, Vimeo), music (Spotify, SoundCloud), Google services (Maps, Search, Calendar), social media elements (Facebook pages, comments and likes, Twitter feeds, Instagram, Pinterest and more), and a good range of form-related services that includes Wufoo, Google Forms and Moonfruit's own form.
As mentioned earlier, you aren’t bound by your original website decision. Should you need to add more pages to your website, they’re only a few clicks away. To do this, go to the Sidebar’s ‘Pages’ section. You can include ‘Articles’ (which appear to be a blog in all but name), a ‘Testimonial’ page, a ‘Team’ page, a ‘Gallery’, and even a whole ‘e-Commerce’ section and an ‘App Market’ (among others).
Moonfruit does provide a decent file manager for managing your content. Upload website images and you can organize them into folders, view them as grids or lists, and sort your media by name, size, or age (the newest first, or oldest). Files can then be added directly to images boxes or galleries without having to re-upload them every time.
The competition
What stands out the most about Moonfruit is how advanced the editor is. There’s lots of web hosts available that provide space to create a blog (like Jimdo, Fasthosts, and SimpleSite). However, Moonfruit has an editor that helps you as you go along.
Some of the options are a little more basic than some of the competition, with the company offering a smaller number of responsive templates. Still, these can be customized by tweaking individual details or dragging and dropping full content blocks. Your pages can include image galleries, forms, maps, social feeds, embedded videos and more.
Final thoughts
Moonfruit is a good website builder for creating your own unique website. Plans aren’t very expensive, so you can share your portfolio and business ideas without breaking your wallet. Moonfruit comes with several bonus options including the ability to embed Instagram and Pinterest content, as well as PhotoSnack slideshows, and an HTML Snippet option may allow you to use content from some other sites.
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