Jimdo Website Builder: Good, Bad and Ugly
There are a lot of different website builders out there, so if you’re going to attract an audience, you’ve got to stand out. Whether you have a great price (read: free), great template designs, or simply great customer service, something about your website builder needs to differentiate itself from the slew of other quality sitebuilders out there.
Enter Jimdo. Although not a spectacular smash-hit in the world of website building, this Jimdo review is willing to cut it a little slack and admit that it’s not the worst option available.
Okay, so maybe it’s not exactly the most glowing recommendation you’ve heard for any website builder. But to discount Jimdo’s overall quality, despite my personal preference for other builders like Yola, would be downright deceitful. That’s not how we roll here at Clickfire. So I’m going to give Jimdo a good once-over and explain why I rank it where I do. What do you say we do it Spaghetti-Western style?
Jimdo: The Good
What’s there to like about Jimdo? Plenty, actually. One of the first items I always look for is a simple pricing structure. Jimdo has one of those, and of course, it offers both free and paid versions – hardly out of the ordinary for a website builder these days. You can check out the individual pricing plans at Jimdo here.
The pricing plans – dubbed “Business,” “Pro,” and “Free” – are simple enough to remember. But you’ll want to take a look at the individual features of each plan before you make a decision. Jimdo’s got a free plan that allows you to handle the basics of website building – templates, storage, blog creation – and sometimes that’s all really people ask about. More on the pricing structure later.
As for the bang you get for your buck, the Jimdo designs are actually among the better website builder designs out there. Sure, any web site is going to put its best foot forward on its portfolio page, but if you’re like GoDaddy WebSite Tonight, you don’t have great feet to put forward in the first place. Jimdo succeeds here.
A deeper look into the actual website building process at Jimdo reveals why this is the case. Like all good website builders, Jimdo keeps it simple. The templates aren’t hokey or corny and don’t particularly look like they belong in the previous millennium. Considering how big a feat that is for any free website builder these days, it’s actually quite the unexpected bonus.
The other advantages of using Jimdo are relative simplicity and easy-to-use interfaces. You shouldn’t have any problems recommending this website builder to the Internet newbies among your friends and family. Of course, you’ll want to hold off on the “recommendation” decision until you see this next section.
Jimdo: The Bad
How do we say this? Jimdo’s free pricing plan is…bad. Yeah, we know: it’s free, so how can we complain? Well, a lot of things are free that aren’t worth signing up for. Do you have a million e-mail accounts? No, because it robs you of your time, despite how free they are.
And yes, we acknowledged and even applauded the “free” price in the preceding section, but a close examination of the features yields a somewhat less flattering picture.
For example, consider that you won’t be able to use e-mail addresses on the free site you build. No email addresses? Argh! If that’s not a big deal to you, consider that you can’t use your own domain in the free version of Jimdo. Argh! And if that’s not a big deal to you, consider that you’ll have to host ads on your free Jimdo page.
Argh.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Jimdo is steering you in the direction of their more steeply-priced options, so-dubbed “Business” ($15/month) and “Pro” ($5/month). While the prices here are not unreasonable, they’re about $15 and $5 more per month than I’d prefer to pay, if you catch my drift. Upgrading your pricing scheme within the Jimdo structure will yield you better page designs, but if you’re willing to pay for more quality, then why not pay for someone to handle your website in the first place?
You can host a store at your Jimdo site but again, this will factor into their pricing scheme. You can’t have a store using their free version, which should be reason enough that you consider a myriad of other website builders out there, even if it’s just to do a little price comparison. Considering you can’t even upload your logo to your free site (which, again, will host ads), you’ll definitely want to keep Jimdo on your “maybe” list at best.
Yeah, we know. It’s hardly a big-time recommendation. What can we say? This isn’t the most glowing Jimdo review you’ll find online.
Jimdo: The Ugly
The previous section pretty much tackled the ugliest parts of Jimdo’s service, so let’s focus on the nitty-gritty. What can we conclude about Jimdo? Well, it’s an attractive, simple-to-use site that at least does offer free services with which you can mess with. But anyone serious about creating a real Internet presence won’t be serious about using Jimdo – that is, unless they’re willing to pay a few bucks a month. Sure, it’s not expensive to upgrade to Pro or Business, but that’s not any reason you should.
If you ask me, a simple, free website builder should have the following characteristics:
- Easy-to-use interface
- No price
- Quality templates and designs
- The ability to host a site on your own domain for free
- Quality integrations and features like the ability to host an online store
Jimdo aces some of these requirements, but it totally fails on the other ones – it’s a very up-and-down state of being. With the quality website builders available these days, Jimdo has some tough competition and unfortunately just doesn’t measure up. Their downfall? Simply being too stingy on the good features. If you make people pay for what they can find for free somewhere else, they’re going somewhere else. And you probably should, too.
Rating: 
August 22nd, 2011
Tried this CMS and I don’t like it. Aside from the ones you mentioned, it’s also not-user friendly. I had a hard time setting up a blog and a page.