I quickly signed up for it whilst I was at university and claimed my URL of alexandermoore91.moonfruit.com. I was initially very disheartened as when I tried to access the editor at university I was quickly apprehended by Flash telling me I needed to update or install something for my browser in order to continue. This was a major put off straight away as none of the other creators ive been involved with had any compatability issues of any kind! Frustraitingly enough the Mac's (don't wanna start a debate here guys, but BOOO!!) at Uni disallowed me from updating Adobe's Flash plugin or whatever it was (I was so put out that it had a compatability issue that I didn't even wait around to find out what was wrong exactly!).
When I finally made it onto a machine which allowed me to install the plugin or whatever I was yet again faced with an editor which was very simple, drag and drop style. It looked as if it was ripped straight out of Windows 98 and didnt look half as contemporary or modern as the other creators, but that's not something I wasnt going to deduct marks on.
I began to play with the template I'd selected using the editor which I can only compare to an early version of Microsoft Publisher (not necessarily a bad thing, fiddly but I'm sure many of you would be right at home with the interface). However, I very quickly started to struggle with it and make quite a mess. This was extremely frustraiting and it got to the point where I literally walked away from it. I'm not saying it's impossible, it's still easy infact, it just takes more time to get used to and less of a cavalier attitude than the other editors I'd experienced.
As you can see from the screenshot, I didn't even manage to replace the sample images from the template with my own before needing a time out.
All of this sounds negative but I think Moon Fruit has a lot of potential. Looking at the sites other people had created using it I was very impressed. I saw a lot of fashion and clothing websites fully set up for ecommerce with shopping carts, baskets and checkouts etc. That just goes to show that with more time and patience you could create something brilliant with it. Not only that but again, the advertising is fairly subtle with a small Icon at the very top right away from the main content container, and a small sentence as the very bottom of the page. This is most certainly positive.
For me, Moon Fruit isn't the way to go, I feel it needs an awful lot of polishing to make is shine as much as some of the others. But I can sure see the potential!
