I tried Moonfruit for the first time last night, and I have to say I'm *Very* Impressed, both on a personal level (ease of use and quality of results) and a professional level ("enormity and complexity of task" to "how easy they made it look" and "feature richness" to "creation time" ratios)! There is some exceedingly impressive coding here.

Drawbacks? Well, the finished site is a Flash-based website, which reduces the available viewing population to those with Flash 5 capability... but these days that only rules out sites which must be as accessibility-friendly as possible, leaving a wealth of personal, hobby, fan, and club sites, as well as many more.

The editing interface can be a bit of a faff to use, for example, to make an image into a link (a very simple thing to do in normal HTML) you have to first add the image (the easy part), then create a link, change the scale until it matches the shape and size of the image, position it directly over the image, change the colour of the link background to full transparency, delete the link title, and save.

However, on the whole this tool is extremely easy to use. You have to really try hard to mess up the results, which are generally pretty darn professional looking - i.e. better than the results of most "build a site" sites. They also provide a comprehensive and extensive library of widgets and graphics, which contains some real gems.

Within half an hour I had the basic elements of a website for my EverQuest guild (http://wyrdangles.moonfruit.com/)together - including a news posting system, message board, member database, screenshot uploads, calendar of events, a system for writing and publishing articles, the usual links page, and multiple access levels (ie read, write, edit, delete rights).

It took me rather longer to configure everything "just-so" - I have leanings toward perfectionism - and to fill in all the text (about 4-5 hours in total). However, this did include my spending a considerable amount of time tweaking and repeatedly changing my mind ;)

Other good points - as a user I can create multiple sites; I share my personal 20Mb of storage between them, so don't need to duplicate files. Other people can upload stuff to one of my sites (eg such a picture to go by their member listing in the above example), and it is stored in their area, rather than filling up mine. Among the other widgets available are a photo gallery( used above for the screenshots), 2 sizes of poll, a News feed with many many topics, a web-search box (no more sending users away to see the results), as well as a handful of "Fun Stuff" such as games and animations.

Given how long this site would have taken me had I carried on from my original HTML-based site (http://www.tupia.net/wyrd/) to add in the desired backend gadgetry, I'm extremely impressed with this tool. And as a web designer and CGI coder by profession, I'm even more impressed with the coding skills that have gone into making it... *Kneels and worships* I'm not worthy - and I certainly wish I was!

Recommended: Yes

Monthly fees (US$): Free
Hosted on Secure Server: No
Main focus of Web site: Publishing/Content