Jimdo Review

As a company, the manufacturers of Jimdo have taken great pride in working hard to make building websites as simple as possible since 2007. With its Dolphin editor, Jimdo hopes to eliminate web-designing competition so it would fall in its favor.

Upon its release, there was a circulating hype that with Jimdo, you can build a professional-looking website and get it online in a matter of minutes – shorter than any other similar website-building tool. Knowing these, any beginner can make a great website in just a short time. You don’t have to acquire any coding skills, and the basic version is free.

Upon logging in to Jimdo’s interface, you’ll notice the website editor. Newbies don’t have to deal with abstract-looking menus and interface elements. For instance, you can hover your mouse to edit a piece of your site.

The editing view opens up by clicking on the highlighted area, enabling you to change text and formatting. So technically, it’s just like using a standard word processor like Microsoft Word. However, when uploading photos and images, the process is also simplified.

By clicking on the “add element” symbol and choosing “photo,” you can select the image you want to add from your computer’s hard drive. Then, by clicking and dragging at the photo's edges, you can resize it easily, just as you’d do with any word processor.

The whole process is seamless because, aside from seeing the results instantly, the photos are compressed in size on the spot, giving you a much more efficient way of storing files for your site.

There are also many additional tools and features you can use as a picture gallery, adding videos from YouTube or other similar platforms, and you can even easily add snippets from Google Maps. These elements are embedded in Jimdo intuitively, making them so easy to comprehend and use. Moving an element around is very easily done through the drag-and-drop method.

In the sidebar, you will find the main menu, and at the top, you will find the main layout. This can give you easy-to-access options for changing the general look of your website by browsing through templates and having a quick preview of how they might look if you apply them.

The good thing is that the design templates are just recently crafted to fit the look and feel of today’s modern websites. The templates are also designed in a responsive way. As a result, they will automatically mold themselves into almost any device that might view them, whether they’d be smartphones, tablets, or laptops.

Though not all templates are responsive enough to all phones, you can easily customize them by browsing their settings menu. Under it, you can see the “style menu,” which is a powerful feature that’s way ahead of other similar website builder tools in existence.

The colors and fonts you can add to your website are almost limitless. You can immediately see the style editor opening up by clicking on anything you want to change. You can already choose any font style or color you want, which should give your site the ultimate customization features you envision.

Jimdo’s Editing Tools

The virtual setup wizard makes the Jimdo editor stand out among the other similar tools, which truly simplifies the site-building process. Upon starting the actual task, you’ll be prompted to choose between a blog, a website, or an online store.

You will then be given options if you want to proceed as a tech-savvy designer or a complete newbie with no coding experience. Then, by choosing the Dolphin editor, the setup wizard will collect the details it needs so that your site can be appropriately configured in a step-by-step manner.

The smart wizard can automatically integrate photos for your Instagram or Facebook accounts. Embedding videos are straightforward too. After a very few steps, you can add the finishing touches to your site by using the element editors that you can find in its menus.

You can add photos and contact details of a certain establishment with the data provided by Google. Then, with the smart algorithm of Jimdo, the best photos are automatically selected to ensure that your website can appear in its most beautiful form, visually speaking.

The Jimdo Creator

If Jimdo’s editing tools are not enough for you, the Creator interface it offers should suffice. Upon first glance, the menu is clearly visible. You can make basic changes to website elements, page structures, design, and layout.

If you demand more flexibility and creative control during the designing process, Jimdo also allows integration from other tools. This is a testament to its acceptance of its limitations. The editor might appear to be basic, but it’s effortless to use. For instance, if you want to edit text, you must click on it and start typing right away.

Jimdo’s Dolphin is also equipped with basic SEO features. Some details of your site will be optimized automatically even before you start doing it yourself. In addition, you are given a ‘to-do list’ on the sidebar, which is helpful so you won’t miss out on any vital task that your site needs.

However, you can only change the home page's title, then choose generic titles for all the other pages. Any SEO settings beyond that are configured and applied without much intervention on your part. This can be a huge disadvantage if you’re trying to build a reputation within a very competitive niche.

Security and SEO

Jimdo includes a feature in its settings that lets you secure certain site areas with a password. For instance, you only want paying users to view a particular portion of your site; you can lock that area with password protection to avoid unwanted intrusions. Any aspects of your domain name and specialized email can also be configured from there.

Because SEO is an essential element in website building, Jimdo includes a feature for website builders that allows SEO optimization. By subscribing to a Pro or Business plan, you can optimize your website for Google and other search engines.

This advantage should make you rank higher in search results, which naturally increases your viewership. This means that sales will be higher compared to your competitors. In addition, any website you create with Jimdo gets its page title and page description.

By choosing keywords and phrases that can truly describe the page, Jimdo’s interface will give you a preview of how your site will appear as a search result – this is something that most web designing software does not have.

Jimdo’s Online Store Features

Many web-designing tools are already prepackaged with online store functionalities. To keep up with the competition, Jimdo also equipped itself with features that can help you design your online store.

You can start designing your online store under the settings menu. You can set your store’s currency within it, whether they’d be dollars, euros, or any currency of your choice. You can also allow Jimdo to handle sales tax. For your convenience, the software does the calculation for you. However, Jimdo will only use this tax-rate for in-state orders.

For the time being, it is not possible yet to define state-specific tax rates. If you are within US territory, this is a notable disadvantage. As a remedy, you can use PayPal to handle state-specific tax rates. If you set up PayPal as the only payment option for your online store, this issue will be taken care of automatically.

You can add a little product preview to your homepage with the store catalog element. This makes it easier for clients to have a glance at your products, so they’d be enticed even more to make purchases. In addition, the catalog element is convenient if you want to showcase your latest items.

What Jimdo has to offer in terms of online-store creation is among the easiest tools you could ever come across. Every feature is crafted by its manufacturers in-house. This means that the look and feel of your store are the same when viewed next to the rest of Jimdo’s website builder features.

In building your online store, you can already promote your product to a global audience in as little as 10 minutes. If you plan to showcase a store with not more than 15 items, Jimdo pro should be good enough as an option.

The business plan should be your ideal choice if you want to sell more products. Neither of these 2 plans requires a sales fee which adds a great level of ease for you as an online merchant. Unfortunately, for the moment, Jimdo does not support an automated way of selling digital goods. Not too long from now, though, its developers will be sure to add such a feature.

Weighing Down the Key Features

Ease of use has always been one of its greatest strengths of Jimdo. Upon the release of its newest editor, it improved further. There are a variety of functions visible on its menus. They are easy to understand even if you have no prior experience in web design.

The inclusion of an email service and a domain name is one of its attractive aspects. Though this is only available in the pro and business versions, it removes the hassle of buying a separate domain name from other agencies, which will consume a lot of time to integrate into your site.

The generosity of the hosting plan Jimdo offers is evident in the affordable storage space it provides. Given its key features, Jimdo emphasizes the “beginner-friendliness” it is so fond of showing.

One of the weaknesses that might discourage you from using Jimdo is its photo-editing limitations. One of the most noticeable disadvantages is its picture editor. Images can’t be directly edited or cropped within it.

The absence of importing and exporting functionality is also evident. Merging your other site’s content or exporting the one you built with Jimdo could be a problem. If you plan to build an eCommerce website, the features are limited. Though it features a distinct online store creation tool, the embedded eCommerce tools are not handy enough.

Looking for Jimdo in app stores is also another problem. Unlike most popular web designing apps, Jimdo isn’t featured prominently yet in such places. Though Jimdo has its downsides, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.

Upon browsing through Jimdo’s interface, you might quickly notice that the template selection process differs from other solutions. You are allocated a design instead of having to scroll down through a gallery of templates. That’s one phrase you don’t have to worry about at all.

In its entirety, the design templates are modern and compatible with a range of devices, whether handheld or not.

The templates it provides and the flexibility the design options give can transform any idea into a digital reality. However, unlike WordPress, which features a nearly endless set of templates, only a few templates are available. Jimdo seems to lack the freedom of integrating many template choices for your site.

It is also essential to look into the pricing options for any web-builder tool. For example, Jimdo offers 4 different plans for standard websites. The Play plan lets you try out the website until you are satisfied without spending a penny.

If you want to get rid of ads and get your domain name, you need to purchase the Start plan, though you are only allowed to make up to 10 subpages only. You can choose the Grow plan to avail of more subpages, storage space, and higher bandwidth for your site.

To avail of Jimdo’s best plan, you have to choose the Unlimited plan. It has a very attractive priority support service. With its Start plan, you can have a free domain name, but only during the first year of subscription. After that, you’ll be charged an annual fee of around $20.

The following are the corresponding fees for Jimdo per month, billed annually.

• Unlimited: $39
• Grow: $15
• Start: $9
• Play: Free

Compared to its competitors, the prices offered in Jimdo are just mid-range.

Jimdo Dolphin, the most recent incarnation of this web-designing tool, is the perfect tool for anyone to build a website with the least hassle in the shortest time possible. In addition, Jimdo is extremely easy to use, making it very suitable for novice designers.

Because of its setup wizard, you can make a website draft in minutes. Although you are not granted direct access to plenty of design templates, those that the setup wizard suggests are good-looking enough that they would fit any possible category you might think of.

Another significant upside to Jimdo is that you can use its editor on any smartphone. Compared to other similar tools, Jimdo provides a much faster loading time, proving it is among the lightest tools.

However, it is also worth noting that the number of subpages you can make is limited. For example, you can only create 5 pages and only 10 with the Start plan with the free version. Wanting to have more than that requires you to purchase the other higher plans.

Jimdo is only suitable for creating basic websites. To attest to this, let’s acknowledge that the current Dolphin editor doesn’t come with blogging features or password protection. It is also important to remember that your actions are very limited when it comes to modification.

You can’t integrate some elements like social media buttons and sharing functionalities to other platforms. As of the moment, there is also no way of editing the HTML codes, which also hinders your options for scaling up your website.