Moonfruit Standard review

Moonfruit has a free entry-level offering and a range of other packages. The Standard product sits above Free and Lite variants, and should suit most personal and entry-level commercial uses.

In many ways, this is how an online web-design application should look. It’s polished and slick, but still has nearly all the features you could need. Starting with a wide range of pre-designed templates, all of which look clean and modern, it shows the full page on-screen with a toolbar across the top and selection palette down the left side. Individual dialog boxes appear as tools are selected and everything happens in real time, as if the page were being locally edited.

The shop facilities are well integrated into the web design and you can enter each item for sale in a separate database screen, which includes facilities for options, such as postage to different areas. Sale items can be categorised, too, so you can list, for example, CDs and DVDs under different headings.

Connections to social media include Twitter and an RSS feed, and Facebook Connect enables visitors to log into your site using their Facebook credentials. Any site you create is also available in a mobile-friendly form, with all the graphics removed and the essential text displayed on your smartphone or tablet. Mobile visitors can still read all the content and even buy goods from the shop.

The only real shortcomings of Moonfruit Standard could be the storage allowance, which at 1GB is a lot lower than some of its rivals, and a bandwidth limit of 20GB, when most such services are unlimited.