Still looking for ways to make your business visible? Here’s another option.
Following my website editor comparison, I got an email from Matthias Henze at Jimdo, asking me to take a look. They’ve got a compelling offering overall, with some really interesting features.
Here’s the quick overview:
- Jimdo’s clearly the work of a team outside the US. On the positive side, you can work in one of four languages (German, English, Chinese and French) and Matthias tells me “…others to follow soon.” You can also set which of dozens of languages your site content is in, presumably to aid with local search. These are nice touches that I haven’t seen elsewhere.
- Jimdo offers 500 MB storage for free and 5 GB at the paid level.
- Business owners can easily embed code for Google Analytics, meta tags and meta description.
- Excellent support for accessiblity. While this is a more advanced area, it will help you with SEO and in support of disabled users. It also might be a legal requirement depending on your business.
- Jimdo offers multiple layouts including direct access to the HTML, CSS and images for full-featured editing. I’m not a fan of their default designs, personally, and it might require more design work than the others reviewed. On the other hand, if you have your own design, moving it into Jimdo looks dead simple.
- On free sites, Jimdo inserts AdSense ads of its choosing. Not ideal for many small businesses, but many not be an issue for all. The big concern is whether those ads display competitors and how Jimdo accounts for that. I’ve got a message out to Matthias Renze to see
- No email account at the free level. May not be an issue for everyone, but it’s something to consider
- Jimdo has a somewhat quirky interface, to my tastes, but it’s very simple once you spend a minute with it.
- You can add a personal domain, email address and eliminate the ads for $6/mo. I like this business model, personally. Coupled with their ad strategy, they should be able to succeed financially, assuming they get enough users.
So, how does it stack up compared with Weebly and Wordpress, my favorites of the bunch? Very favorably. The folks at Jimdo have done a good job of covering the basics for their customers, with some really sophisticated options for those who need them. And if you’re in Europe or Asia and need an edtor that supports your language, Jimdo might just be the best solution for you. As with other solutions, I couldn’t find an easy way to get content out, so that’s worth investigating further. In either case I’d recommend upgrading to their Pro offering to eliminate the ads on the site, gain access to an email address and host your own domain. For $72 a year, it’s well worth the added brand value.
As before, the options available to small business owners to have a site that meets their needs blow my mind. We’ve come a long way from the days of FrontPage or hand-coded HTML. If you don’t have a website today, Jimdo, or its competitors will likely meet your needs. Given these options, why is your small business still invisible?
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{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
Great Site. Keep up the great work.
Jimdo recently provide also an e-shop feature at no costs.
Thanks for giving us that news about Jimdo, Alessandro. And thanks for reading!
You wouldnt believe how long ive been looking for something like this. Through 9 pages of Yahoo results without finding anything. One search on Bing. There you are!…. Really have to start using it more often!
Jimdo is great. It gives easy access to all the blogs Jimdo offer some very good blogs on SEO tips also you find great response to your blog if you posted here. It directly helps to boost page rank in Google.
Yes, that’s all good, but seriously, how long would it take to implement this? Do you have to be a professional webmaster or can I just do it as a newbie and actually succeed? How should I get started?
AskiKa.com
great tool , very easy to use , definitely try Pro version .
My time at Jimdo was fine until I had to leave. They have hijacked my domain name and will not allow me to transfer it 3 months after my obligations with them were over. Worse, for the past 12 days I have used every possible way to contact them, email, forum, Jimdo Pro’s direct support and for 12 days I have received zero response. If U need a service that U will never ever EVER need customer support than Jimdo is ur ticket. But if U ever do need it, good luck.
Hi Craig,
That’s really disappointing to hear. I’ve forwarded your comments to my contact at Jimdo. I’ll let you know if they respond. Thanks for the comment.
Hi Craig,
The folks at Jimdo seem to have tried to contact you, as did I following their response, but it looks like you’re not getting the emails. Here’s the response I got from the Jimdo team:
One of the great things about social media is the voice it provides customers. It looks like Jimdo is willing to work with you to resolve the problem. Please, Craig, let us all know if you got everything you needed.
Hola, mi experiencia con jimdo es, de momento muy positiva. He conseguido hacer mi propia web, me sale mucho más económica que la que antes tenía y, además, puedo hacer cualquier cambio en el momento que desee sin tener que esperar a que me lo haga un informático.
Con jimdo pro me responden en uno o dos días, siempre, y además de forma muy cortés.
Se puede aprender mucho en el blog y en el foro. Tal vez al principio, en algunas cosas y según tu nivel, necesites de alguien que conozcas que te pueda ayudar en algo concreto, pero en general es muy sencillo, el panel de control también. Para quien quiera hacer una web con amplias opciones y que sea económica, se lo recomiendo. Con jimdo pro tienes dominio propio, amplio hosting, apoyo tecnico via email con respuesta en 48 horas y tienda online limitada a 10 productos por 60 euros al año.
I have used both Cloversites and Sitekreator.com. Sitekreator.com wins by a mile – better templates, more design flexibility, more add-ons and widgets, and MUCH LOWER price – Cloversites charges a $1000 initial fee, Sitekreator.com charges $0.
Hi Jeff,
Thanks for adding your voice to the conversation. Cloversites uses a very different model, and while $1,000 (really $1,240 for the first year and $240 for each year after), may seem like a lot, their builder and tools might make sense for some businesses. I’ll look to do a detailed review of Cloversites at some point (or you could join our guest bloggers and write it for Thinks). In either case, thanks for the comment and I look forward to hearing more from you.
There is an incredible war on the net, to produce and market the most successful online web page builder.
It is an incredible challenge in a weird market.
We are all working hard to conceive the easiest idiot proof interface to allow anyone to present their content on the web … it is mainly a big lie…
Once technology becomes so easy to use that it is transparent, when you achieved a really incredibly easy tool to organize content into interlinked pages … You still leave users with the most important aspect of creating a website:
Actually producing and organizing the content…
It seems to me that this is the real challenge. Some kind of simple “web-note-page-pad” with a result that is easily browsable by the most inexperienced reader and on all (mobile) devices with a single site.
Our contribution to this equation : http://www.simple-different.com
Yorick
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