WHO KILLED MOONFRUIT?

I remember the days when people created websites for family and close friends. I mean, you were that guy; the guy family came to if they needed a website designed for someone’s business, personal, wedding or landmark birthday, to showcase the pictures and basically project happiness. Personally, I have also had to design obituary websites for family members who have passed on. Those particular websites bring no fun in terms of creativity, but importantly I could earn extra income. That feeling of knowing that I could earn an extra income without having to sell drugs or do anything else illegal or dodgy was priceless! It made me feel special (and I don’t mean special needs – no disrespect),  I mean an above average individual.

On this track, I went from just designing websites for friends and family to, designing websites for local businesses in Birmingham. It was slow winded but the more I canvassed, the more it grew as a business. At this time I was front-end, back-end, Sales, Customer Services, HR, Legal, Graphic Designer, SEO expert and Business development Manager for my company. That being said, I think the main reason for such growth was because inside, I am a nice person and that’s what you got when you spoke to me. The fact that they have met with me personally and knew I would be dealing with every aspect of the process was key. Customers liked that there was no first line team or second line team… just me!

Another reason why my website design business grew was because I was not afraid of canvassing. I was never afraid of traveling around Birmingham, Solihull, pretty much all of The Midlands, a few days a week canvassing for new clients building relationships; a relationship of convenience. This was an important factor and I made people laugh while in conversation. I was born with these gifts and have had these qualities in me my whole life. I was always happy to answer any questions they may have had and explain the process to follow step by step, in terms of how we would move forward with the website.

I loved to draw as a kid and I did this a lot. I loved Marvel and DC comics and I also loved watching cartoons. I could occupy myself easily by drawing cartoon characters like Danger Mouse, Tom & Jerry or Inspector Gadget. Then, when I received my new comics at the end of the month, it was Captain America or Thor… I mean I could do this all day and be happy. I also enjoyed still life drawings, so maybe after church on a Sunday morning, I could look at a section of the house, rearrange everything if need be and take flight. The end product got better and better but at this point in my life my biggest fan was my magnanimous mother. She got me the tools I needed and bought me all the comics and magazines. She also helped me channel my creativity; she was the real star! And so, when I was aged 12, after she was assassinated, shot and killed in her car while on a visit to Nigeria in 1990 (On the 27/12/90) I lost everything, including my passion for drawing. She was only 43 years old; May her beautiful soul continue to rest in peace.

As far as Website Design as a business is concerned, it all started February 2012, in Moseley, Birmingham. I went into an independent clothing shop in the village to see what they had. I bought some clothing, as you do and then got chatting with the owner (a young Urban English man in his late 30’s I presume). I always made an effort to make conversation and I was a loyal customer and so over a period of time we became friends as well. Like everybody else, I feel good when I’m nicely dressed but most importantly, I have always been one to support local businesses. One day he mentioned Moonfruit to me. I had never heard of this website builder prior to the conversation with Matthew, but I knew about computers from studying Computer Science in university and Website Design at South Kent College in Ashford. I remember being the best student at SKC evening classes, which I attended before my night shifts on the Railway. My tutor Ray was always happy to see my work he was the kind of person that appreciated hard work and he always said to me “You’re going places”. So yes, I was definitely interested in finding out about this Moonfruit platform, coming from MSDOS and Microsoft Frontpage. Matt told me that the bank had introduced him to this website builder but that he just couldn’t seem to get his head around it. He also complained that it wasn’t user friendly. So, I went back home, fired up my PC and got to work.

It took me a while to understand the Moonfruit platform and I noticed that I kept forgetting things that I had learned a few weeks back. Maybe due to the fact that I had not used that particular Plugin or added that snippet since the first day, but It didn’t stop me from learning. At the is time I was working as a clerk, but I wasn’t earning enough money, so I decided to set up my own website design business. I found my first client through a colleague I had worked with, whose brother was opening a phone shop and asked me to design his website. Now, I had my first client and he was very happy with the website design but then it slowed down and so I started canvassing. This form of marketing was efficient in my opinion, as I was gaining up to 3 clients a forth night and I was always so happy to come back home and say to my beautiful wife… “I got another one today” what joy!

It was tough financially at the beginning, I’m not going to lie, Basically I survived on credit cards but after a year I had around 15 clients. Some businesses closed down afterwards, so I was always on the lookout for prospective clients. However my resident clients were requesting changes daily, weekly and so on. Some of these requests were alien to me, so I would raise a Support Ticket with Moonfruit Support and by the next day I would receive a response. This happened like clock work for a period of time and then one day I heard the bad news. Yell.com had bought into Moonfruit, my heart sunk.

I read the comments on the forum and sent an email to the backend team to better understand what this meant, they said there would be no changes and that every thing would carry on as before. I knew this wasn’t possible, not just by intuition but I was now also in a position where I would converse daily with business owners and listen to their likes and dislikes. I had heard a lot about Yell.com prior to this take over and it wasn’t good, not in the slightest. No one seemed to be happy with the fact that they never received what they were promised by Yell.com but still had to pay for the full year. They were terribly upset and couldn’t wait until the end of the year to cancel their subscription.

As time went on, the responses from Moonfruit Support team would take up to 48 hours instead of the usual 24 hour turnaround. Then it started to take a week before I would get a response, then down to totally despondent, no replies whatsoever. System updates were not being made regularly hence none of the feature Plugins were working and customer service staff based offshore were very rude and unhelpful towards affiliates - it was a nightmare. I use the word nightmare because I used to have nightmares about it for a long period of time. I was losing customers because I couldn’t comfortably respond to an enquiry… I seemed incompetent, unable to answer their questions as to why a certain feature wasn’t compatible or simply just wasn’t working. In particular, the contact form feature on Moonfruit websites, this feature would just stop working and as you can appreciate, this would offend anyone.

This became such a problem that I had to start paying separately, to use contact form features designed by a German software company called C****ider.

Then came the day that Yell.com/Wix took over completely… all of my customers websites went down. I was only informed of this changeover, 24 hours before Moonfruit shutdown and disappeared off the face of the planet.

When Moonfruit closed and changed over to Yell.com/Wix, half of my websites did not move over. Those that did move over were in a horrific state. Random pictures that I had never seen before, had appeared in the strangest of places. Other pictures that were supposed to be present, had disappeared and text was all over the place. When I tried to make any changes, I was shocked to find that I couldn’t, because Yell were listed as the owner. This meant that I now had to call and ask permission to make any and all changes to my own websites. I was distraught. I had put literal blood, sweat and tears into securing these clients and maintaining their websites for years, only for Yell to commandeer my websites and insist that they now owned all of the websites and content therein.

I thought offshore customer support was bad… UK Based Yell.com customer service office was the worst experience I had ever had in my life! absolutely appalling. I knew I was done and I lost even more customers that very day - I think I lost around 9 customers in one day. DNS transformation was a disaster, as no one on either side (YELL nor WIX) understood my requests. The only way to describe the experience is, I felt how Eubank must have felt after his 41 fight win streak came to an end, at the hands of Steve Collins. That’s how I felt mentally and I am still recovering, till this day!

I have now managed to move the hand full of customers that I had left, over to another platform and quietly move away from anything relating to Yell.com or Wix, in order to get away from the mental trauma I have had to endure. I know I will remain scarred for the rest of my days.

BELOW ARE SOME OF THE TRUSTPILOT REVIEWS FROM FELLOW MOONFRUIT CUSTOMERS:

All of these reviews can be viewed online if you search Moonfruit Reviews in Google.

WESLEY

I was really happy with moonfruit...

I was really happy with Moonfruit having built a free website and pay no yearly fees to them directly!
I have just received an invoice from yell of £89 to host my website for the year ???? I did not agree to this and stunned I now have to pay for it they have been no help whatsoever cant even access my website even tho they want me to pay them each year what an absolute joke

Date of experience: 26 May 2022.

KAY

Very poor handling of this transfer to…

Very poor handling of this transfer to Wix. Moonfruit chat starts then never finishes. Wix also don't answer properly. Now stuck in the middle with each telling me to contact the other. Can't update my website. Spent a great deal of time over the last few weeks on this and getting nowhere. Paying for a service that I am not getting.

Date of experience: 07 December 2021