Though Jimdo started with a pair of teens working in an old farmhouse in northern Germany, the company now produces a slick, modern website builder and boasts more than 200 employees.
Jimdo is also notable for launching the first iPad app for web-based site building.
More recently, the company launched Dolphin, an automatic site builder that can do most of the work for you, a feature that supplements Jimdo's customizable responsive designs.
Jimdo is worth checking out on the strength of Dolphin alone, but our Editors' Choices, Duda and Wix (which also has an automatic site builder), offer far more in terms of templates, third-party widget galleries, and photo storage management capabilities.
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Pricing, Getting Started
You can begin designing a Jimdo website before even signing up for an account.
Jimdo's free account is generous by industry standards.
You're only limited by the amount of storage your site consumes, which is capped at 500MB, and the bandwidth at 2GB.
Jimdo lets you have more than one free site, as Duda, Wix ($14 Per Month for Combo Plan at Wix) , and Weebly do.
The Pro ($7.50 per month, billed annually) and Business ($20) tiers remove Jimdo branding from your site, include custom domains, increase commerce limits, add site stats, and increase your storage cap to 5GB and unlimited, respectively.
The Business plan also includes online store functionality and premium support.
Site builders typically charge about $25 or more per month for business-level features, which adds up to $300 per year, compared with Jimdo's $240.
That's a good deal.
Designing Your Site
As of this past May, Jimdo now offers two ways to build your site: The standard site builder and the new Dolphin AI-and-wizard-driven simple site builder.
Jimdo claims this lets you create a site in just three minutes.
The first thing you do with Dolphin is enter the name of your business.
Dolphin then shows you possible businesses it found online content about, and you can click on the one that is actually yours, or skip the step if you don't see it.
Next, Jimdo asks about the purpose of your site, whether it's promoting a business, event, or portfolio, or selling good or services online.
Then you choose from a more specific list with choices like Bakery and Fast Food.
You can then connect your Instagram account for images.
That's helpful, but I'd like to see Flickr and Facebook here, as well here.
Choose a style—Modern, Elegant, Playful, and so on.
After this, Jimdo gives you the option to register a domain or you can transfer one you own.
You can get one from namecheap.com starting at 66 cents, if you don't already have one.
If you pass on that, Jimdo assigns you an address on the jimdosite.com domain.
The result? In my testing, the site that Jimdo produced after a bit of churning was remarkably on point.
It even pulled in photos of the local bagel shop I used as a test.
The copy was appropriate, too (if a little exaggerative of Dave's Bagels charms and quality) and things like menu items contained boilerplate copy that needed editing.
Note, also, that the site uses responsive design and even presents a GDPR-compliant cookie notice.
If you go the standard Jimdo site builder route, your first choice is to determine whether you're building a Website, Store, or Blog.
You then select a subset, like Bar & Restaurant or Community & Clubs.
Next, you create your site from a template, as you do with nearly all online site builders.
There are 15 good-looking site templates at the free level, with 40+ variations at the paid levels.
You can also start with a blank site.
A few of the templates use a stylish full-screen background image.
I like that Jimdo shows how a template will look on a smartphone as well as a widescreen webpage.
After choosing your template, you choose an address in the form yoursite.jimdo.com.
As with Dolphin-created sites, you can also register a custom domain with either paid account level, or you can enter one you already own.
Web Design With Jimdo
Jimdo's site-building interface strikes a compromise between that of Squarespace ($12 Per Month (Billed Annually) - Personal Plan at Squarespace) , which shows the whole site while hiding the controls, and Wix and Weebly, which always show a toolbar.
Jimdo shows your full site, with a collapsible editing toolbar.
Most of the other site builders' toolbars include items to place on a page—photos, spacers, buttons, text boxes, forms, and the like.
Jimdo's toolbar focuses instead on template choices, style customization (mostly font options), blog posting, SEO, and stats.
You work with the actual page elements from overlaid menus and boxes that appear when you mouse over them on the page.
This is similar to the way Squarespace works.
It initially took me longer to find webpage elements to add than with most other site builders, but after some brief familiarization, using Jimdo is no more difficult than using Squarespace or Wix.
Once you get past required template items such as the header and title image, you see the Add Element option.
This offers column dividers, spacers, photos, videos, text, forms, share buttons—just about everything I've come to expect of a site builder.
You can drag and drop some elements to a different box on the page, but doing this didn't always produce the expected result in my testing, and sometimes the WYSIWYG editing view didn't match my live site.
You have to dig to find some of Jimdo's capabilities.
For example, when I tried adding a column within a column, a message said it was no go, and it appeared that I was only allowed to have two evenly divided columns.
But then a blue Edit Columns bar appeared, and this let me resize them and add up to six columns in the template I'd chosen.
So it's more flexible that it appears at first.
I later ran into a problem, however: I couldn't delete a middle column, even after repeatedly pressing the trashcan icon.
A bigger problem is that the builder has no undo capability, except for text entry.
This aesthetic of gradually revealed capabilities also shows up when you're editing text.
When you first add or start editing text, you get a simple control that lets you boldface, italicize, or bullet-list your text.
But a "…" menu adds alignment, size, and color choices.
You also get background-photo tiling and alignment options, as well as overlay effects that look like screens over your image.
Specialty items like file downloads, forms, maps, Facebook and Twitter feeds, and a guest book are also on offer, but you can't upload audio or video files to play.
If you don't find what you want, you can add an HTML widget from any site that does offer the particular kind of Web nugget you're after.
There is a Pinterest sharing option for photos, but I would like to see a few more Web connections, such as Flickr galleries, Tumblr feeds, and Pinterest walls.
Customizing Page Style
You edit most types of content directly on the page, but for overall site options like background, menu style, fonts, and the like, you need to click the paint-roller icon.
This changes the hover-over options to font and color options.
I appreciate that there are hundreds of background pattern choices, though I wish they were categorized for easier finding.
A neat trick is to use a video background from Vimeo or YouTube.
I couldn't see the video in the editor, however; it was only visible on the live site.
Finally, for those with web development expertise, Jimdo allows full HTML and CSS customization.
Managing Pages and Site Navigation
Adding or editing pages to your Jimdo site is a simple matter of hovering the cursor over the site-navigation links.
When you do this, a blue Edit Navigation button appears, and from this you can add a new page, reorder existing pages, or remove them.
At first, I was thought that you couldn't create nested page links, but a button lets you move the selected page as a subset of the one above.
Each level can have menus below its level, so your site structure can get as complex as you like.
One inelegant thing about page addition in Jimdo is that if you add more than the page width can accommodate, a second row of nav links is created.
Weebly handles this by using a More link that leads to the excess page links.
You could do this manually by indenting the pages, but two or more navigation rows isn't something you see on a well-designed sites.
Free accounts can use a custom favicon (that small image that shows up in the browser address bar), but you have to upload an image with exactly the right pixel dimensions.
Other site builders such as Wix resize the image for you.
Working With Photos and Galleries
One disappointment with Jimdo is that it doesn't save your photos in your own online collection.
If you want to use the same image in different places, you have to reupload it each time.
There's no longer even the option to add images directly from Dropbox.
Also, you can forget about stock photography, such as that offered by Duda and Wix.
However, the builder now offers inline Pixlr image editing tools, which is a big help.
When you resize an image in Jimdo, you can't expand the borders already set, which makes it difficult to get the layout you want.
When adding galleries, you can upload multiple image files at once.
When I hit Upload, a big percent countdown displayed, and then a grid of my photos with another editable grid below that.
This let me drag photos around to reposition them, choose between square and rectangular thumbnails, and select cozy, compact, or spacious views.
There's now a justified view with photos tightly packed and in their original aspect ratios.
You also get slideshow auto-play and full-window options—nice!
Getting Social
My test site had social sharing buttons automatically added to the bottom of the home page, thanks to the template.
When you add the Share Buttons page element, you have a choice of 16 networks, at your choice of size, in the networks' original color or monochrome, with square, round, or octagonal buttons.
These buttons let your site viewers share your page to their social accounts.
If, on the other hand, you want to send them to, say, your Facebook page or Twitter feed, Jimdo offers separate page elements for these purposes.
And the Twitter element can add a specified number of your most recent tweets.
For Facebook feeds, a scrolling box appears starting with the most recent posts.
Mobile Site Building
Many modern site builders make a big point of producing mobile and responsive sites.
Jimdo's Settings panel offers two relevant options: Mobile View and Mobile Express Page.
If you activate a mobile template, menus (and even purchasing) will work on phones.
If you don't, your videos won't play, and navigation will be tough.
Once I activated a mobile template, my site worked well (and was fast) on my iPhone X.
Slideshows are particularly well done, with a full-screen option.
Mobile Express is an extra page for your site on mobiles, letting you enter crucial info like address and business hours.
I do, however, miss some other builders' ability to add a mobile splash screen image.
The other side of mobile site building is when you actually build your site on a mobile device.
Jimdo was the first of its peers to launch an iPad app; Weebly also has an app web designer, while Wix's app only lets you manage your online store transactions.
Jimdo's app is well designed and intuitive, but offers fewer content types than Weebly's app.
Blogging
Jimdo beats Yola in at least one way: It offers blogging capabilities.
Press the bullhorn button and you're ready to tell the world about your views, your news, or your latest product for sale.
A comment feature lets site visitors talk back to you.
First you must activate your blog, and then your posts will show up on the top of your home page by default.
You can set posts to publish at a specified time, and save them as drafts—a lot of site builders don't offer that level of publishing control.
When composing a blog post, you have all the same page elements Jimdo offers for regular webpages, which makes sense—you're not locked into the traditional text with photos.
On the downside, this setup doesn't let you wrap text around an image.
You can also set a custom url ending for posts, in an SEO boosting attempt.
Since there's no Publish button, it took me a minute to figure out that you have to slide the Published slider and then hit Save to go live.
Making Money From Your Site
There are two basic ways to make money on your site: selling stuff and displaying ads.
For sites without huge traffic, the former is far more lucrative.
Free accounts can sell five items, Pro gets you 15, and Business is unlimited.
For sales to work, you have to complete your personal profile and enter your PayPal API credentials, which requires a PayPal Premier or Business account.
Other site builders let you simply enter your PayPal login.
Jimdo does let you do a test order, and its shopping cart experience is as good as that of any site builder I've reviewed.
You can add variants of your product, specify shipping costs and include an estimated shipping time.
You can also set the available item quantity, but it doesn't decrement as people buy them.
You can view your orders, inventory, and customer details in the Store panel.
Unlike most other site builders, Jimdo doesn't offer a way for you to sell digital downloads, a deal-killer for certain kinds of online entrepreneurs.
Delivering store discount codes requires the top-level Business account.
Jimdo now offers Stripe for payment processing as well as PayPal, for paid accounts only.
Sending newsletters or running promotions or discounts aren't options in Jimdo.
In sum, Jimdo's e-commerce offerings fall far short of those of Duda, Squarespace, Weebly, and Wix.
Publishing Your Site and Other Site Settings
Jimdo includes a custom domain registration with Pro accounts, with painless setup and a private registration option.
The way to publish your site, however, isn't very clear.
I prefer builders with clear Publish, Save, and Preview options.
In fact, my site was live on the open web from the moment I started working on it.
You should really be able to...
