Moonfruit was a UK-based company that offered a

website A website (also written as a web site) is any web page whose content is identified by a common domain name and is published on at least one web server. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, such as news, educatio ...

building service.

History

Moonfruit was launched in January 2000 during the

dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (or dot-com boom) was a stock market bubble that ballooned during the late-1990s and peaked on Friday, March 10, 2000. This period of market growth coincided with the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web and the Interne ...

, 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 city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

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

French language French ( or ) is a Romance languages, Romance language of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European family. Like all other Romance languages, it descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. French evolved from Northern Old Gallo-R ...

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, person, or office 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) r ...

Gandi 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 uni ...

(the British Yellow Pages publisher) acquired Moonfruit in a deal worth £23 million. In 2013 Moonfruit's

Flash Flash, flashes, or FLASH may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional aliases * The Flash, several DC Comics superheroes with super speed: ** Flash (Jay Garrick) ** Barry Allen ** Wally West, the first Kid Flash and third adult Flash ...

-based platform was adapted to render sites in the HTML 5 format to enable website presentation on devices not supporting Flash, such as

iPhone The iPhone is a line of smartphones developed and marketed by Apple that run iOS, the company's own mobile operating system. The first-generation iPhone was announced by then–Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, at ...

s and

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s. 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, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

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

Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...

MacBook Pro The MacBook Pro is a line of Mac laptop computers developed and manufactured by Apple. Introduced in 2006, it is the high-end sibling of the MacBook family, sitting above the ultra-portable MacBook Air and previously the low-end MacBook li ...

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