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.