Celebrating the Swiss Army knife of our web design tools
Need a social feed on your website? That home page missing a great slideshow? How about a booking form for your online clients?
Well, step this way my friend and take a look at the tool that can perform all these tasks and more. The HTML Snippet widget.
For anyone who doesn’t know, the HTML Snippet widget is one of our most popular and useful tools.
On the surface, just a simple box, it allows you to paste HTML code into any page of your website.
This means that hundreds of third-party features and applications that otherwise wouldn’t be compatible with our software, can actually be used.
Come with us then, on a tour of our best and lesser-known uses, as well as saying hello to some of the lovely Moonfruiters putting them to good use.
Rollover images
Since the debut of the HTML widget there have been some awfully creative discoveries by some of our users. Not least designer Matthew Bick, who created a new way of adding interactive rollover images and buttons to his site.

Pretty snazzy hey?
Well, he’s generously shared his secret. Thank you Matt.
FAQ section
And we dive straight into another great bit of code, this time written by long-term user ‘Dino’.
This snippet allows you to add an interactive FAQ section to any page in your site, so any visitors can visit your website, access a list of questions and click to reveal the answer to a particular query.
Not bad Dino, and thank you for sharing.
MailChimp
The Internet’s most popular email marketing tool.
You can create multiple mailing lists and generate the sign-up forms that can be embedded into your website. It’s a great way of bringing you closer to your visitors and keeping them informed.
Just ask keen Moonfruit user Marije Oostindie, artist and founder of Ateliera Andact for example.

Marije uses MailChimp to create mailing lists for her followers and to let them know all about her latest incredible art work and designs.
To help you do the same, we’ve created a step-by-step guide.
Payloadz
So, you’re selling e-books and you want to allow your customers to pay and instantly download their purchase? Enter Payloadz!
The perfect digital download tool, you can set it up to take payments for files, guides, graphics and software, then sit back as the automatic delivery service takes over.
Click on the image below for more info.

Facebook feed
Yeah, you can embed a Facebook feed.
Simple to set up, it makes your Facebook status updates and activity appear automatically on your site too.
Here’s fancy pub snack purveyors McStrongs using it with aplomb.

You can see how they set that up here.
Twitter feed
Not to be outdone by Facebook, Twitter is also compatible with our little snippet box. Much to the delight of writing blogger Chloe Wright.

Phone number link
So, say a customer needs to call you, what’s the best way of making sure they get through? By adding a direct link to your mobile from your website of course.
Incredibly easy to implement, but really very useful if you’re running a business from your website. A phone link allows clients viewing your website on a mobile to press the number on screen and their phone will immediately start calling you.
Interior design aficionados Silk Interiors demonstrate:

Photosnack
Slideshows, albums and portfolios. Yep, you can set up them all up through the HTML widget.
For example, Photosnack is a popular choice for interactive homepage slideshows…

Comslider
An equally impressive slideshow provider is Comslider.

You can find illustrated guides for both here.
Then there’s…
CoolIris
Which lets you add beautiful effects to your photographs and also integrates nicely with Facebook.
Issuu
And Issuu. Great for all sorts of publishing, but do check out the Visual Inspiration section.
Getty Images
Finally, to round off our image sub-section we have Getty Images. One of the biggest suppliers of stock images and film, they have recently made 40,000 of their images free to embed on websites.
You simply browse their library, copy the code from your chosen image and drop it into the HTML widget. A fantastic resource.
SoundCloud
That’s your visuals sorted then. Now how about a bit of music?
Well, you can create playlists and share your musical tastes by adding SoundCloud to your website.

You can even use it to record and upload your own tracks, which has certainly proved essential for audio and visual media designer DigiBoy Design.

To find out how DigiBoy made it happen, check out our recent article.
Next up…
Polldaddy
Create surveys, polls and competitions with “the most powerful and easy to use survey software around”.

Whether you want to gage genuine opinion or just have a bit of fun with your visitors, it’s a pretty cool app for an interactive website.
We’ve gone and made a fully illustrated guide to help you set it up too.
Tables
Sort your text into nice rows and columns thanks to online tinkerers Text Fixer. They allow you to create and embed tables of various sizes and styles in just a few minutes, which means you can customise them to totally fit your websites aesthetic.
Here’s our own ‘how to’ for doing just that.
YouTube
Yay. Home of countless funny cat videos and instigator of procrastination, the world’s favourite video host is also one of the treats found in our tool box.
Here’s one we made earlier.
Vimeo
…And do check out Doozy Media using YouTube’s arch enemy Vimeo to balance things out.

BookingBug
An old favourite now, one that lets you take bookings and schedule events through your website.

Again, BookingBug can be fully customised, so the the appearance of the booking form matches your page design.
Here the lovely team behind Travelholics show us it in action.

And BookingBug themselves show how it’s done.
Google Maps and Calendar
Last on our list we have 2 more favourites courtesy of Google.
There’s their famous map feature. Essential if you need clients or customers to locate you.

And Google Calendar.

So, what you going to try first?
Maybe you have your own suggestion for the list or even something you’ve created yourself. If so, do feel free to share in the comments section below and we’ll gladly add your discovery to the mix. More the better we say.
And, if you haven’t got a website with us yet, but really want to try out these features, then you can start a free trial today. What you waiting for?


Thanks Moonfruit – this is really useful. I just added a Facebook feed to my handmade textiles and jewelry website, http://yaansoon.moonfruit.com – the page looks much lovelier now!
FAQ section has no link to actually take you to anything but back to this page!!
Hi Kendra,
Sorry, which link/feature were you looking at?
Andy
Hi, the link related to FAQ section doesn’t exist and redirects to this main page. Could you please fix or share it? It is to add interactive FAQ section to any page.
Thanks
Hi Silvia,
I’ve fixed the link now (you may need to clear browser cache in case it tries to take you to the old link). You can find the FAQ here:
* Blog: http://www.moonfruit.com/blog/how-to/know-can-create-faq-section/
* FAQ: https://support.moonfruit.com/hc/en-us/articles/202889662
Cheers, Steven
Shame our ShopIntegrator ecommerce HTML Snippet widget for selling digital downloads, tangible goods and customised items for free from a moonfruit website isn’t on your list
Our moonfruit integration guide is here for anyone interested: http://www.shopintegrator.com/cms/moonfruit-shop-cart-basket-add-in-ecommerce-buttons.html
Hey Simon,
Oh, amazing. We’ll add that one to the list shortly.
Well done.
Andy
Thanks Andy! It will be brilliant for Moonfruit to include ShopIntegrator’s in your list of great 3rd party HTML Snippet’s.
It will give your customer’s even more choice when building their Moonfruit site if they want to use different payment processors for example such as Sage Pay, WorldPay, Authorize.Net, PayFast, First Data and others we support. Merchant’s can sell deliverable goods with shipping costs, digital download products and customised items in the same shop using our moonfruit HTML Snippet ecommerce add-in.
Cheers
Simon
Snippet widgets are simply amazing! My new motorhome hire site has online booking, sliding images, mapping and feeds for Facebook and Twitter. Not bad for a complete novice on a computer!
Thank you for featuring Silk Interiors. We have a new home page now, but we still use the phone number feature you described. As well as a Mailchimp newsletter opt in form. And a Google Map showing distance that we will travel for a free measuring service. We’ll soon be adding a slideshow to the home page, just waiting for our photographer to take some new photos of client’s work.
It’s a shame the basic widgets such as counters are not available on V6 version.
Hi Bob
You can embed a site counter using the following site (it doesn’t cost anything): http://www.simplehitcounter.com/
All you need to do is generate the code and then embed it using the HTML Snippet Widget. Hope that helps!
Amita
Thanks worked. Hoping you do get some of the widgets back from earlier versions still.
I like this list especially since I never gave html snippets much thought – some of them I never expected to see here
There are some missing though – I would add Skype to the list
Hi – thanks for the great suggestion! We’re working on a new list of things you can add using the widget and will include this. Cheers!
For one reason or another, I can’t see all of this text, stuff keeps disappearing? Are you using XHTML?
Hi,
can you give a few more details about what you are having a problem with? Alternatively, please raise a support query and include as many details as you can!
Cheers, Steven
I see that you have mentioned the great comSlider but without link on it.
Therefore, strongly recommend, here is the link: http://www.comslider.com
Hi Willy,
I’ve added a link to the post
Cheers, Steven