Getting things started

Well, who would have wanted to design a whole new website after a year of lockdown? Not me that's who but my existing Moonfruit website has finally given up the ghost along with lots of other creative users too.

Promoted back in 2012 as the website provider to go for if you were an artist, photographer or creative of any type Moonfruit gathered up their users by the hundreds & thousands. 

There have been a few bumps along the way including the front end website building being sold off a few years ago. This separated the building and editing from the domains and email hosting and ended the honeymoon period for my website.

After this point most of the prettiest template options had gone, there was no way of upgrading your subscription so no way to grow what you were offering and the customer support became woeful with no phone helpline and an online chat function that you could leave for days without getting a reply. The remaining great techies at the new Names.co.uk luckily offered good support for the domain and email functions at least.

So, as you can imagine, I had been thinking of a new website anyway but when the lockdown hit in 2020 that all had to be put on hold as we all scrabbled around for a way to keep our businesses going. With no shops open or markets happening all sales were online so I couldn't afford any downtime for creating a new site and wasn't sure I would be able to pay for it soon either.

As the year progressed and sales came in things began to look a bit more positive and I started to plan for a future again. At this point Moonfruit announced that with the end of support for Adobe Flash Player the editing function for my website was due to fail at the end of December 2020. They were of course going to solve this by then so there was nothing to worry about.

Yes, you guessed it, the stuff has well and truly hit the fan and as of 11th January 2021 I can hardly do anything on my old website. It looks sad and forlorn and I could easily sell something I know longer have in stock. Great!

So in the last few weeks I have been immersing myself in the world of new e-commerce websites and my brain feels decidedly mushy as a result. I did the research I could from online reviews, feature comparisons on spreadsheets and chatting to those makers I know who are happy with their websites. In the end I had to get my hands dirty and test out the three that I thought would be the best fit.

If you'd like to know more check out the next blog in the next few days.