As mentioned in my previews post, I recently started looking for a different free hosting plan. I spent last 7 years on Moonfruit.com free plan and when they abruptly decided to drop their free plans past August I had to purchase their paid hosting in order to keep my sites. They gave me a 50% off deal for 12 months so i am sticking with them until August. Until then my goal is to test a few free hosting plans that include an easy to use click and drag web builder.
So far I created accounts with 3 companies. All 3 offer a free plan and also same web builder called Zyro. This builder is nothing extravagant , but it was good enough for my needs. It's certainly easy to sign up with any of these hosts and test this builder to see if it works for you. Otherwise more advanced users can build sites using wordpress , drupal etc.
1. 000.webhost.com
This site allows you to create two sites with their free plan. You can point two custom domains purchased elsewhere to these two sites. They don't force branding ads so you end up with a nice looking site with a custom domain and no branding ads all for FREE.
Just like any other free web builder or hosting they have certain limitations. Unofficially it seems like they want you to have at least 10 visitors every month otherwise they might mark your site inactive and put a banner advertising their paid plans.
2. 10xHosting
This host offers one free site and pointing one outside purchased domain. They have a branding ad but it's in the footer and I didn't find it very obtrusive. From what I could find out your site will stay alive if you log in once a month.
3. Hostinger
Hostinger has 2 GB disk space and 100GB bandwidth. You can park 5 outside domains.
It appears that they limits free sites to 250 visitors a day.
They use Zyro builder just like the other two free hosts . This builder lets you back up your site and download it to a file on your computer. I had one backed up from 000.webhost and I was able to upload that site to Hostinger builder without any issues.
So backing up your site is a nice feature that for example moonfruit builder doesn't have.
All of these hosting companies of course offer paid plans.
Here is a comparison for paying upfront for 12 months for plans that allow you to create multiple web sites under one account. They offer cheaper plans if you just want to build one site.
000.webhost actually sells paid hosting through hosting24.com and they charge $7.99 a month when you pay for 12 months in advance.
10xhosting charges $5.95 a month when you pay 12 months in advance
Hostinger $5.84 a month when you pay for 12 months in advance
Hosting24 has a pretty quick chat communication that can answer a lot of questions about their paid plans. I found out that hosting24 and Hostinger are actually owned by the same company.
All 3 paid plans offer unlimited storage and bandwidth.
I will host some sites on these 3 free hosting companies and post my experience .
Wednesday, January 18, 2017
Wednesday, January 4, 2017
Replacing Moonfruit with 000webhost.com
As I mentioned in my previous post, my long time favorite free web builder Moonfruit.com decided to close it's free plan. I managed to save my two most important sites by upgrading to their paid version. I am exploring other options now to see if I can discover another hidden gem in the world of free web site builders. Moonfruit's free plan had 3 main advantages. They had a nice click and drag builder that allowed me to start my site from a blank page and customize it just the way I wanted. Second great thing was ability to use my outside purchased domain name with their free plan. This is very rare to find, most builders like wix give you a free site but you can only use custom domain if you upgrade to a paid plan. Third , moonfruit had very limited branding on their free plans. Back when I opened my early accounts it was just a line in the footer . I had plenty of the old accounts to work with that it didn't bother me that later they switched to branding moon fruit logo in the header. This only affected newer accounts.
My contract with Moonfruit (first year 50%) expires in August so my goal is to find a different free host / builder that would have similar features as Moonfruit.
I tested out wix.com and I really liked their builder but free plan is limited to wix.com subdomains (only paid plans let you integrate your custom domain), and they have pretty annoying branding which is standard on free plans.
Just recently I stumbled on a free hosting service (000.webhost.com) that looks promising .
000webhost has a decent web builder that allowed me to replicate my moonfruit site. It has less features then moonfruit's builder but for my needs it was perfectly sufficient . This host surprisingly lets you integrate your own custom domain and doesn't display annoying branding ads on your pages created with free plan. I have been testing this host for a few days and will be posting my reviews in more detail in the future. My main concern right now is how difficult it will be to maintain this free site. Free plans usually have a catch and I am waiting to see how bad this one will be. For example moonfruit free plan would delete your site if you don't log in the account at least once every 6 months. This was really easy to do so that never presented an obstacle for me. 000.webhost is not as easy to figure out. From some reviews online it seems like your site has to have at least 10 visits each month. If you get less then that then they cover your site with a banner that warns you that you will might lose your site soon. You can log in your account at that point and ask them to remove the banner but that reportedly takes 7 days. Obviously this host requires their free users to be very active in watching their sites and making sure they don't become inactive. This is a lot more demanding than moonfruit .
One good thing about 000.webhost is that you can back up your site and save the file on your PC. In case they label your accoutn inactive you can quickly restore your site in that account or open a totally different account and restore the site there and point your domain to the new site. Yes, this seems to be a major hassle comparing to moonfruit and potentially it could be a deal breaker for me.
Every account lets you create two web sites and point two custom domains. To open your account you just need an email adress. So I created one real site and one that I labeled inactive. I am going to test and see how long it takes for inactive site to be flagged due to inactivity. On the other site I will make sure that my real site gets 10 clicks every month . I want to test and see if these requirements to keep the free site are real and how strict they are enforced. As I sit and wait what happens with these two sites I plan to explore other free hosting plans. Hoping that by next post I should have better idea how reliable this free host is and how much work it takes to keep the free sites alive.
Saturday, September 10, 2016
Moonfruit is a no longer a free web site builder
My ride with a free web site builder called moonfruit has been a joyful one. After testing various free web site builders back in 2009 I picked Moonfruit to be the best one for my needs. Over the last 7 years I created multiple web sites without spending a dime. Their web site builder is easy to use and allows you to customize your site just the way you want it. Moonfruit advertisement on free plan sites was very subtle in the footer of the page. They didn't have annoying advertisements on the top of the page and I thought my site looked pretty professional considering it was done with a click and drag editor and using moonfruit's free plan. Another thing that I really loved was ability to connect your outside purchased domain even if you are on free plan. That was unmatched in the industry and to my knowledge none of the other free builders lets you do that. All of them I tested ask you to upgrade to a paid plan before you can connect your domain.
So for 7 years I had a great looking site with custom domain name and very limited small print moonfruit ad on the very bottom of my page. All I had to pay was 15 dollars per year for my custom domain name (I purchased it on 1 and 1 hosting). If I didn't care to have a custom domain everything would have been completely free.
Unfortunately in August of 2016 this sweet ride with Monnfruit abruptly ended. About a week before I was going to take off on a 3 week long vacation I noticed a message from Moonfruit.com announcing that they are discontinuing free plan and that all users have until September 1st to upgrade to a paid plan or lose their sites. In back of my mind I expected this deal that sounded too good to be true to end one day but I was really disappointed that Moonfruit gave us such a short notice . We only had 3 weeks to figure out what to do with our sites.
I scrambled to back up most important data from the sites that I didn't intend to keep. For the time being I kept two most important web sites that I couldn't go without at this time and purchased their paid plan. To be fair they did give us a 50% discount for the first 12 months so I paid about 40 dollars per site for 12 months.
I love the way my sites look like but in the next 12 months I will be seriously looking at other web builders. Once the initial 50% promotion is over moonfruit pricing might not be the best fit for me.
Aside from testing Wix I haven't tried any other free web builders out there in a while. I was pretty content with Moonfruit builder for the past 7 years but it's definitely time to shop around.
I uderstand that this company had to try to bring in more money from the free users but I was surprised they went away with free sites all together rather then just limiting them . Almost all other click and drag web site builders still offer a free version. Yes, it's more limiting in some aspects and has more prominent advertisement then old moonfruit but they still let you test their builder and have a free site. Strangely enough when you google moonfruit it still comes up as a free web site builder which seems to be falls advertising.
Other things that went downhill with moonfruit over the years are forum and some businesses block their site. I work at a large corporation that has 30000 employees and you get a blue screen when you try to open moonfruit.com . Moonfruit user forum was huge back in 2009, it helped me so much as I was learning how to use this builder. People were visiting it often and leaving questions and answers. Right now it's limited to two categories and it doesn't look like many people are commenting any longer.
Anyhow, I will be looking at other free builders or maybe at some more economical paid options.
My site was built for a tennis league that has 10 years worth of past scores and standings. All of this info is now in google sheets stored in my google drive so it can be easily moved to any site maker I choose. I have been using google docs to embed all the scores and standings in my sites using HTML snipet. It worked well and this way I don't risk my info being lost when these companies decide to change plans.
So for 7 years I had a great looking site with custom domain name and very limited small print moonfruit ad on the very bottom of my page. All I had to pay was 15 dollars per year for my custom domain name (I purchased it on 1 and 1 hosting). If I didn't care to have a custom domain everything would have been completely free.
Unfortunately in August of 2016 this sweet ride with Monnfruit abruptly ended. About a week before I was going to take off on a 3 week long vacation I noticed a message from Moonfruit.com announcing that they are discontinuing free plan and that all users have until September 1st to upgrade to a paid plan or lose their sites. In back of my mind I expected this deal that sounded too good to be true to end one day but I was really disappointed that Moonfruit gave us such a short notice . We only had 3 weeks to figure out what to do with our sites.
I scrambled to back up most important data from the sites that I didn't intend to keep. For the time being I kept two most important web sites that I couldn't go without at this time and purchased their paid plan. To be fair they did give us a 50% discount for the first 12 months so I paid about 40 dollars per site for 12 months.
I love the way my sites look like but in the next 12 months I will be seriously looking at other web builders. Once the initial 50% promotion is over moonfruit pricing might not be the best fit for me.
Aside from testing Wix I haven't tried any other free web builders out there in a while. I was pretty content with Moonfruit builder for the past 7 years but it's definitely time to shop around.
I uderstand that this company had to try to bring in more money from the free users but I was surprised they went away with free sites all together rather then just limiting them . Almost all other click and drag web site builders still offer a free version. Yes, it's more limiting in some aspects and has more prominent advertisement then old moonfruit but they still let you test their builder and have a free site. Strangely enough when you google moonfruit it still comes up as a free web site builder which seems to be falls advertising.
Other things that went downhill with moonfruit over the years are forum and some businesses block their site. I work at a large corporation that has 30000 employees and you get a blue screen when you try to open moonfruit.com . Moonfruit user forum was huge back in 2009, it helped me so much as I was learning how to use this builder. People were visiting it often and leaving questions and answers. Right now it's limited to two categories and it doesn't look like many people are commenting any longer.
Anyhow, I will be looking at other free builders or maybe at some more economical paid options.
My site was built for a tennis league that has 10 years worth of past scores and standings. All of this info is now in google sheets stored in my google drive so it can be easily moved to any site maker I choose. I have been using google docs to embed all the scores and standings in my sites using HTML snipet. It worked well and this way I don't risk my info being lost when these companies decide to change plans.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Moonfruit update March 2011
On Monday March 28th 2011 Moonfruit released their new web site , pricing and many other changes regarding features. It was a big suprise to many users to log in and wonder if they are on the right web site.
My first impression about the new look was not very good. The design looked busy, content all over the place. To me the old look was a lot cleaner, more professional and easier to navigate. But look of the moonfruit.com is not that important and eventually you get used to it. I just wanted to find out how the changes will effect my free account. I am already with moonfruit for a while and finally I had my site designed the way I want it.
So lets start with good things.
Page length
I was very glad to find out that moonfruit decided to extend the length of the pages This used to be a big problem for me since a free account lets you only have 15 pages. I had a lot of content that I wanted to store but page lengths were limited so I had to split pages in two to fit it all on. This meant that 2 pages out of my 15 allowed are gone. Now I can fit a lot more text on on page. Aside from this they lifted limitations on how wide a free web site can be. So wider pages are an option now even for free users.
Old users keep their plans
This was another good news. All users who opened their accounts before March 28th 2011 are keeping their features and pricing. For free accounts this means that we won't lose any features on accounts we already created.
So now the bad news
Moonfruit changed pricing for new accounts and limited some features for free sites.
here are limitations for any free account opened after March 28th.
Forms
This was huge for me. New free users can still create simple forms but they can't add any fields to them. So you are stuck with a simple contact form that has 3 lines (email, name ,message). You can edit the 3 fields but you can't add any more. Comparing to pre update this was a major blow to the free accounts. We used to be able to add as many fields as we wanted. To make it even worse if you upgrade and pay you still can't get full functioning forms with the first step upgrade which is $6 a month. To get a form editor you have to upgrade to premium $12 a month plan. This was all free before.
Just like with almost everything else on moonfruit, there is a way around this issue. Free users can go to Jotform.com and create forms for free. Then they can embed these forms to moonfruit sites. It probably won't look as nice as moonfruit forms but it's one way around the issue to get functional forms with multiple fields.
Admin privileges
They restricted admin privileges to site members. In the past you could give admin privileges to some of your members so they can edit parts of your web site. This function is gone for free users.
Share moonfruit
Moonfruit was very nice not to force advertisements on free accounts ,that was one thing that made me try it in the first place. They just had their link on the bottom of the page. They still don't do it, but they added this moonfruit share logo in the right upper corner which is kind of annoying to see considering we didn't have it before.
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Moonfruit 17 months later
Well, it has been about a year since my last post and 17 months since I tried moonfruit for the first time. After a lot of research I finally used moonfruit for my tennis leagues past summer . I quit webs.com and moved all my web sites. Moonfruit worked out great all season, I didn't have any major problems or down time. Only minor issue that happen is that people don't have the latest flash player installed.
I haven't been looking at different site builders lately , and I plan to stick with moonfruit . I still love their builder and ability to fully customize templates. They still don't force ads on free version, they let you use your own externally bought domain even if you only have a free plan. The page limit is 15 and over time I got used to it. I needed more pages to store past results and I just created a separate free site for that. It looks exactly like my main site. I created a link button for past scores which links into my history site. They added an option which lets you open links in the same window so unless you look in the address bar you won't know you left the main site. Only problem with that is transferring scores from the main site to the history one. I am not able to simply copy paste all the tables since moonfruit doesn't let you do that between two sites. So instead of retyping all that data , I made screen shots of the tables and saved them as images. Then I inserted images in my history pages. It turned out pretty good. Yes, pictures take some storage space but it beats retyping it all.
Also, pay pal issue from the previous posts is solved. Instead of using wix.com to create functional pay pal buttons I found an easier way. I inserted an image of a pay pal button on my registration page. When you create a button on paypal.com it gives you an option to copy HTML code or copy an e mail link. I linked the pay pal button image to this e mail link and the button works great. The pay pal widget on moonfruit never worked for me so I haven't even tried it lately. I still use external programs for my blog (blogger.com) and forum. I just create menu links to blog and forum and they open in the same window now. I save couple of moonfruit pages this way and I have better blog than one they have on moonfruit. It seems like they are working on a better moonfruit blog . I use moonfruit forms for player's registration and they have been working good.
I probably have over 10 different free web sites with moonfruit and I am loving it. I am so glad I stumbled upon this click and drag builder.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Weebly vs. Moonfruit
I got an email from Weebly.com today telling me about their new features. I used this site builder a while back just to test it and wasn't to impressed, but I took another look just to see if they improved.
On the paper this free site builder looks pretty good.
No forced adds
You can use your own domain with a free account
No page limits , no bandwith limits
Pay pal and google check out integrated with free version
Form builder
The main disadvantage just like before is limited ability to customize weebly templates. Comparing to moonfruit they are way way behind. You are basically stuck with pre made templates.
The form builder is very limited for the free version, they give you only 5 lines to put in one form, to get more you have to upgrade.
Pay pal integration is a plus, as we know moonfruit only lets you do it with their paid plans. But since I figured out how to embed pay pal button into a moonfruit site (using wix.com as explained in one of my previous postings on this blog) I really don't think about it as a big disadvantage any more.
The only big advantage of weebly.com is unlimited number of pages for a free site option. Free web site builder usually give you between 15 and 20 free pages for one web site. If you want more you have to pay for their premium plans. Moonfruit lets you create only 15 pages .
Domains
I have been purchasing my domains from 1and1.com for 6.99 for the first year 8.99 after that . I had great experience so far using my domains with moonfruit.com. They have a very detailed explanation in their support section on how to point your externally purchased domain to you moonfruit site. Even though it says in the instructions that it might take 72 hours to complete this usually takes just couple of hours after you point your domain's A record to an IP adress provided by moonfruit. Aside from no forced adds and great site builder this ability to use your domain makes moonfruit a great choice for creating a free web site. A lot of their competitors don't let you use your own domain unless you are a paying customer.
Site stats
I have been looking for a good program to measure traffic on my sites. I tested google analytics, site meter, goingup, clicky, and 99stats. I need a program which would give me all visitors listed and tell me what pages on my site they went to, how long do they stay and how they got to my site in the first place. Also I need visitors location. I don't have a huge number of visitors so I really don't need programs that do all these percentages, breakdowns etc. etc.
Google analytics gave me tons of info , percentages , breakdowns etc etc, but it failed to give me a simple visitor tracking I need. It was too cumbersome . I don't need to know that one particular page gets 63.33 percentage of all visitors and stuff like that.
Site meter was very good but you can only measure traffic on one page with one sitemeter account. So for a blog or one page site it is perfect. It lists visitors and when you click on a visitor it gives you location, internet provider/company, time spent, referring site.
Clicky would be my best choice for a multi page site but for some reason moonfruit pages get labeled weird in it so you can't determine what page on the site the visitors went to. I used this program on webs.com and it was great. You get a list of visitors and it shows what pages they went to, you get their location, time spent on the site etc. But the fact that it doesn't list moonfruit pages by their name is a deal breaker. I only can see that some page is visited but characters that display don't tell me which one.
Goingup.com
This one was a waste of time. Interface is very very slow, stats are recording with a huge delay and it kept telling me that I need to fix code that I got from them. I would stay away from this one.
99stats
This one is actually good, I used it on one of my blogs, and it works as good as sitemeter. I also tried it with a moonfruit site but for some reason it is not tracking all the details. I will have to find out more about this.
On the paper this free site builder looks pretty good.
No forced adds
You can use your own domain with a free account
No page limits , no bandwith limits
Pay pal and google check out integrated with free version
Form builder
The main disadvantage just like before is limited ability to customize weebly templates. Comparing to moonfruit they are way way behind. You are basically stuck with pre made templates.
The form builder is very limited for the free version, they give you only 5 lines to put in one form, to get more you have to upgrade.
Pay pal integration is a plus, as we know moonfruit only lets you do it with their paid plans. But since I figured out how to embed pay pal button into a moonfruit site (using wix.com as explained in one of my previous postings on this blog) I really don't think about it as a big disadvantage any more.
The only big advantage of weebly.com is unlimited number of pages for a free site option. Free web site builder usually give you between 15 and 20 free pages for one web site. If you want more you have to pay for their premium plans. Moonfruit lets you create only 15 pages .
Domains
I have been purchasing my domains from 1and1.com for 6.99 for the first year 8.99 after that . I had great experience so far using my domains with moonfruit.com. They have a very detailed explanation in their support section on how to point your externally purchased domain to you moonfruit site. Even though it says in the instructions that it might take 72 hours to complete this usually takes just couple of hours after you point your domain's A record to an IP adress provided by moonfruit. Aside from no forced adds and great site builder this ability to use your domain makes moonfruit a great choice for creating a free web site. A lot of their competitors don't let you use your own domain unless you are a paying customer.
Site stats
I have been looking for a good program to measure traffic on my sites. I tested google analytics, site meter, goingup, clicky, and 99stats. I need a program which would give me all visitors listed and tell me what pages on my site they went to, how long do they stay and how they got to my site in the first place. Also I need visitors location. I don't have a huge number of visitors so I really don't need programs that do all these percentages, breakdowns etc. etc.
Google analytics gave me tons of info , percentages , breakdowns etc etc, but it failed to give me a simple visitor tracking I need. It was too cumbersome . I don't need to know that one particular page gets 63.33 percentage of all visitors and stuff like that.
Site meter was very good but you can only measure traffic on one page with one sitemeter account. So for a blog or one page site it is perfect. It lists visitors and when you click on a visitor it gives you location, internet provider/company, time spent, referring site.
Clicky would be my best choice for a multi page site but for some reason moonfruit pages get labeled weird in it so you can't determine what page on the site the visitors went to. I used this program on webs.com and it was great. You get a list of visitors and it shows what pages they went to, you get their location, time spent on the site etc. But the fact that it doesn't list moonfruit pages by their name is a deal breaker. I only can see that some page is visited but characters that display don't tell me which one.
Goingup.com
This one was a waste of time. Interface is very very slow, stats are recording with a huge delay and it kept telling me that I need to fix code that I got from them. I would stay away from this one.
99stats
This one is actually good, I used it on one of my blogs, and it works as good as sitemeter. I also tried it with a moonfruit site but for some reason it is not tracking all the details. I will have to find out more about this.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Working around 15 page limit
I stayed busy working on moonfruit in the last week or so.
I am currently building a page which would have a list of my members. Logical approach was to create a table where I would have names listed and member's contact info. It turned out nice , but I realized that the e mail addresses are not click able, meaning you can't click on the address to automatically open your defaulted email (for example outlook) with desired address already in the "To" field. Apparently moonfruit doesn't let you link a text inside of a table cell.
Just like most problems on moonfruit this one has a way around it but it is a long one if you need to create a larger list. I ended up creating a separate text box for each of my member's emails (anything you type in it can be linked to e mail, web site etc) After linking them I ended up dragging each little text box to a corresponding empty cell in my table. It took a while to align it all but now I have a table with clickable e mail addresses.
Now, moving this table would require some work as well. First I would move the regular table , the e mail addresses will stay behind since they are not a part of the table. Next step would be Ctrl click each one and then when they are all selected you can move them in one piece to align with empty table cells where they should be. The other downside is that visitors can't copy these e mail addresses.
Also I played a little with creating a directory for my players. When you are creating a new page in moonfruit one of the options is to create a directory page (aside from blank, blog, photo, forum etc) This directory page lets you create a list of items/memebers/products etc , you can enter about 5 fields of info for each entry. So if you are making a list of memebers like myself for each name you can add their contact info e mail, phone etc. The visitors can see a list of names , clicking on a name opens up the rest of the info about that person. This directory also has a search field and I think you have ability to let your members enter and update their own info.
memebers can download picture and create a link to their e mail or website.
Chrome issue update
In my last posting I mentioned how one of my pages has content disappearing in Chrome browser. I posted a message in the forum, and one of the site leaders thinks that it may be due to very long pages that I create. He thinks that site maker works correctly on pages up to 4000 pixels long.
I am not convinced that this is the main problem. For example the page in question is not over 4000 pixels and content starts disappearing at about 3000 pixels well under the maximum. Aside form this I have some pages that are 5000 pixels long and they look fine in all browsers. If there is issue with flash not working at 4000 pixels how come that this problem doesn't exist in Internet Explorer?
To make it even more complicated I found out that some of my sites visitors can view the page in question in all 3 browsers without any trouble. All the content is visible to them.
I will work on this issue and try to make some sense out of it. The site leader suggested splitting my content to more shorter pages, but this won't work for me because I have 15 page limit on my free moonfruit site. To fit all the past data and leave enough space for future stats i have to maximize the page lengths in order to stay under 15 page maximum.
Page limit
The page limit for a free moonfruit site is 15 pages. Since as i mentioned before I am only interested in building a free web site, this page limit sometimes can create problems especially if you plan to add a lot of content and features on your site. So this is how I get around it.
For starters I try not to use some of the weak moonfruit features , for example their blog or forum. Instead, I find a good external program . For example I like to use http://www.blogger.com/ for creating my blogs, and http://www.forumotion.net/ for my forums.
Using these external programs gives my site better features and also saves me two pages in moonfruit for something else. I usually create a menu link on my moonfruit site to these external programs. So when someone clicks on the blog tab in my menu a new window opens up with my blogger blog. I customize my blog so it has same header image and similar colors as my main site, so it looks like it belongs to it.
Downside is that you have to log in on different sites to update the content as opposed to have everything on moonfruit. Also some people wouldn't like new window opening up, or not having embedded blog in same template as the main site.
Another way to avoid hitting the dreaded max page limit would be to create an additional free site. For example, I needed pages to store past results for my tennis league . It takes a lot of pages to record the stats from previous 4 years, so i created a separate free web site on moonfruit which will only be for storing past scores. I named this site rtlhistory.moonfruit.com
so it would look like an extension of my main one. I created a menu link on my main site to this new page and I named that tab History. I totally duplicated my main site's header all colors and background so once you open the history site it looks 100% same as my main site. So visitors don't feel like they are entering a different web site.
The downside is that the history opens up in a new window but clicking home tab on the history site brings the visitors back to the main one.
So long for this posting. Please feel free to post comments or questions about this blog below.
I will try to keep updating the blog regularly.
I am currently building a page which would have a list of my members. Logical approach was to create a table where I would have names listed and member's contact info. It turned out nice , but I realized that the e mail addresses are not click able, meaning you can't click on the address to automatically open your defaulted email (for example outlook) with desired address already in the "To" field. Apparently moonfruit doesn't let you link a text inside of a table cell.
Just like most problems on moonfruit this one has a way around it but it is a long one if you need to create a larger list. I ended up creating a separate text box for each of my member's emails (anything you type in it can be linked to e mail, web site etc) After linking them I ended up dragging each little text box to a corresponding empty cell in my table. It took a while to align it all but now I have a table with clickable e mail addresses.
Now, moving this table would require some work as well. First I would move the regular table , the e mail addresses will stay behind since they are not a part of the table. Next step would be Ctrl click each one and then when they are all selected you can move them in one piece to align with empty table cells where they should be. The other downside is that visitors can't copy these e mail addresses.
Also I played a little with creating a directory for my players. When you are creating a new page in moonfruit one of the options is to create a directory page (aside from blank, blog, photo, forum etc) This directory page lets you create a list of items/memebers/products etc , you can enter about 5 fields of info for each entry. So if you are making a list of memebers like myself for each name you can add their contact info e mail, phone etc. The visitors can see a list of names , clicking on a name opens up the rest of the info about that person. This directory also has a search field and I think you have ability to let your members enter and update their own info.
memebers can download picture and create a link to their e mail or website.
Chrome issue update
In my last posting I mentioned how one of my pages has content disappearing in Chrome browser. I posted a message in the forum, and one of the site leaders thinks that it may be due to very long pages that I create. He thinks that site maker works correctly on pages up to 4000 pixels long.
I am not convinced that this is the main problem. For example the page in question is not over 4000 pixels and content starts disappearing at about 3000 pixels well under the maximum. Aside form this I have some pages that are 5000 pixels long and they look fine in all browsers. If there is issue with flash not working at 4000 pixels how come that this problem doesn't exist in Internet Explorer?
To make it even more complicated I found out that some of my sites visitors can view the page in question in all 3 browsers without any trouble. All the content is visible to them.
I will work on this issue and try to make some sense out of it. The site leader suggested splitting my content to more shorter pages, but this won't work for me because I have 15 page limit on my free moonfruit site. To fit all the past data and leave enough space for future stats i have to maximize the page lengths in order to stay under 15 page maximum.
Page limit
The page limit for a free moonfruit site is 15 pages. Since as i mentioned before I am only interested in building a free web site, this page limit sometimes can create problems especially if you plan to add a lot of content and features on your site. So this is how I get around it.
For starters I try not to use some of the weak moonfruit features , for example their blog or forum. Instead, I find a good external program . For example I like to use http://www.blogger.com/ for creating my blogs, and http://www.forumotion.net/ for my forums.
Using these external programs gives my site better features and also saves me two pages in moonfruit for something else. I usually create a menu link on my moonfruit site to these external programs. So when someone clicks on the blog tab in my menu a new window opens up with my blogger blog. I customize my blog so it has same header image and similar colors as my main site, so it looks like it belongs to it.
Downside is that you have to log in on different sites to update the content as opposed to have everything on moonfruit. Also some people wouldn't like new window opening up, or not having embedded blog in same template as the main site.
Another way to avoid hitting the dreaded max page limit would be to create an additional free site. For example, I needed pages to store past results for my tennis league . It takes a lot of pages to record the stats from previous 4 years, so i created a separate free web site on moonfruit which will only be for storing past scores. I named this site rtlhistory.moonfruit.com
so it would look like an extension of my main one. I created a menu link on my main site to this new page and I named that tab History. I totally duplicated my main site's header all colors and background so once you open the history site it looks 100% same as my main site. So visitors don't feel like they are entering a different web site.
The downside is that the history opens up in a new window but clicking home tab on the history site brings the visitors back to the main one.
So long for this posting. Please feel free to post comments or questions about this blog below.
I will try to keep updating the blog regularly.
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