Moonfruit was a UK-based company that offered a

website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google Search, Google, Facebook, Amaz ...

building service.

History

Moonfruit was launched in January 2000 during the

dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compo ...

, and was supported entirely by advertisements. When the bubble burst, it became a subscription-based service. Later, the company was bought out by its

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

-based staff. The service is now in its sixth version, including a

French language French ( or ) is a Romance language of the Indo-European family. It descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire, as did all Romance languages. French evolved from Gallo-Romance, the Latin spoken in Gaul, and more specifically in Nor ...

version, with further languages to follow. In April 2011, over 3.5 million websites had been built using Moonfruit's point-and-click interface and drag-and-drop templates. By the end of 2011 over 4.4 million were created with another 1.2 million in 2012, bringing the total to 5.66 million websites by the end of 2012. SiteMaker is a reseller of

domain registrar A domain name registrar is a company that manages the reservation of Internet domain names. A domain name registrar must be accredited by a generic top-level domain (gTLD) registry or a country code top-level domain (ccTLD) registry. A registrar ...

Gandi Gandi SAS (''Gestion et Attribution des Noms de Domaine sur Internet'' – "Management and Allocation of Domain Names on the Internet") is a French company providing domain name registration, web hosting, and related services. The company's main ...

so SiteMaker customers can register domains for their sites, in return Gandi offers SiteMaker as an option to its customers in addition to its own website builder. Turnover reached $1.9m in 2009, before shooting up to nearly $4m in 2010, with its SiteMaker subsidiary making a loss of £1.26m in 2011. On 16 May 2012,

Yell A yell is a loud vocalization; see screaming. Yell may also refer to: Places United Kingdom * Yell, Shetland, one of the North Isles of the Shetland archipelago, Scotland * Yell Sound, Shetland, Scotland United States * Yell, Tennessee, an unin ...

(the British Yellow Pages publisher) acquired Moonfruit in a deal worth £23 million. In 2013 Moonfruit's Flash based platform was adapted to render sites in the HTML 5 format to enable website presentation on tablets and Apple based devices. The HTML 5 rendering engine continues to be improved with new features and improvements including e-commerce, blog page and social platform integration. Moonfruit user created websites that are facilitated by the new build of Moonfruit can be viewed at the non-affiliated Moonfruit Directory. On 8 August 2016 Moonfruit announced that they would cease to offer free websites. The owners of free Moonfruit websites could upgrade to a paid subscription, failing which their websites would be deleted after 90 days. In 2021, Moonfruit announced that the platform will be decommissioned on 7 December 2021.

Twitter

In June 2009 Moonfruit began a promotional campaign using

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

. In celebration of their 10th birthday, they offered Twitter users the chance to win an

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple fruit tree, trees are agriculture, cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, wh ...

MacBook Pro by tweeting their tag, "#moonfruit". One MacBook would be given away each day for 10 days to a random participant who had used the tag. This campaign was successful enough to keep the #moonfruit tag at the top of the trending topics for an entire week and garnered some media attention.

References

External links

* {{official website, http://www.moonfruit.com/
Official SiteMaker website
Web development software Software companies established in 1999 Software companies of the United Kingdom Free web hosting services 1999 in London 1999 establishments in England

History

Twitter

See also

References

External links