Jimdo Review: Best eCommerce Oriented Website Builder

Jimdo.com is great a website builder that can provide you with everything you need in order to set-up the website you want for your business with very little effort. Even though this is platform more eCommerce oriented, that doesn’t mean you can’t build a complex website or even start your own blog.

Started in 2007 by 3 guys in northern Germany, Jimdo has grown to power over 8 million websites, offering support in 12 languages with team members from over 15 countries.

Maybe this why they do such a great job and it is growing each day.

Topics covered in this review:

- Summary: Overall rating  – Pricing – Interface – Design / Themes – Customer support – Bonuses and promotion – Step by Step Tutorial
– Write your own review and comment
* If you want to read this review and tutorial as a PDF file, you can download it HERE.

Summary – Overall review

The good things about Jimdo:
Jimdo is free – Even with their free plan there are enough features so that you build a fully functional website. There are no time restraints and no credit card info needed to sign up and start using their platform.
Mobile – With their mobile editor you can fully customize the look of your website so it looks as good as possible on mobile devices. The ability to further customize the mobile version with the access to the CSS code, Jimdo scores some big points with the users.
eCommerce – I think Jimdo offers the most complete array of features for building an online shop, even for the free plan. They offer features for everything you need to run a successful online store, like automatic email responses to customers, inventory tracking, discount codes for your products or even cross-selling certain products.
Dropbox – Jimdo offers the possibility to integrate your Dropbox account with your website so this way you can minimize the space your are using. This is especially useful if you have a lot of pictures to showcase.

The Cons:
Footer Ad – On the Free plan you are forced an ad with the Jimdo logo on the footer. This is almost a requirement for most of the website builders but is still pretty annoying.
Limited Themes – Even though Jimdo offers some features to allow you to customize the background image other things like that, the quality of the themes is average and mostly inferior to other similar service providers.

Overall Conclusion:
If you have a small business or wish to make an online store, then Jimdo is the perfect solution for you. They offer all the features to satisfy your eCommerce necessities and
that saves you from the need to contact third party shopping carts.

They offer all the features to satisfy your eCommerce necessities and saves you from the need to contact third party shopping carts.

The support is well structured with a large knowledgebase and forums available in 12 languages.

Award:
-  Best for online stores 2013 WBTUTORIAL REWARD

Pricing

You can use Jimdo for free for as much as you want, but if you want to unlock all the features, bring more power to your website or you are interested in getting your business to the next level, then you might want to think about upgrading.

They have 2 paid membership plans that offer great features at reasonable prices:

1) JimdoPro – This package is best for small businesses or freelancers that want to show visitors their products, skills or portfolio. You will have your own domain, ability to customize the website as much as you can and simply start building your own brand.

2) JimdoBusiness – Beside receiving everything that is included with the JimdoPro package, you get access to all the features that Jimdo has to offer. You can have a medium sized business running at its best without the help of third parties.

Another important thing is the fact that you will get priority support from their team, usually within 2 hours.

For the full list of features that each plan has, take look at http://www.jimdo.com/pricing/compare/.

Interface

Jimdo is very user friendly, even if is not a true Drag & Drop website builder. It is more like an add, select and edit platform, but everything you build in front of you reflects on your website.

With Jimdo you don’t have to push any Save or Publish buttons, so you don’t really have to undo things. Just keep working on it until you are satisfied with the outcome and leave it like that.

Design / Themes

To be honest, this is where Jimdo lets me down because the quality of their templates are not that good, and they are certainly not as good as other providers like Weebly or Wix. But, with that being said, there is bright side.

They allow you to access the HTML/CSS code so you can work your magic (if you have this knowledge) and make your theme exactly how you want it to be. This also means that there are third parties that can provide custom made templates, which can be a great option if you are interested in developing your own brand.

Overall, there are enough themes and customization options for you to build a pretty website.

Customer support

Customer support doesn’t seem to be their strong point because the free plan doesn’t allow you to any kind of contact with them. I understand that free members don’t really bring in revenue, but if other website builders can do it, then maybe they need to start doing it too.

The support emails are prioritized, so their support team handles JimdoBusiness inquiries first and than the JimdoPro questions are answered. Not really feeling it but I can understand from the business point of view.

The major issue for me is the fact that they don’t provide phone support for any of their members, not even the paying ones (at least i never found this option to be available anywhere on the site).

Even with this small issues, Jimdo does provide a very well structured knowledgebase and pretty much everything I tried to find out, the right answer was provided.

Bonuses and promotion

At the moment they haven’t issued any new JimdoPro or JimdoBusiness coupon codes, but when they do, we will be sure to add it in this section.

Step by Step Tutorial To Create Your First Jimdo Website

Like always, the first step is to register a new account. And with Jimdo, the signup process is so simple that it only takes a few seconds because, like you can see in the image below, you only need to complete 3 fields :

After you choose your desired name for your site (which will become part of your URL), enter your email address and enter a password, then just check the Terms of Use button and you’re done.
*Don’t forget to check your email in order to activate your account !

Now your are in what called your Dashboard, which is where you will see everything you will build, edit or remove because the Jimdo platform is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) builder.

On your right side you have the control panel where all the important settings are at. I will take each function, one by one, and discuss everything it does and everything you need to know to make the most out of your website.

The first one is “Layout” where you can choose your website’s layout and theme. You can choose from a selection of templates that you can find under Free and Special because JimdoPro and JimdoBusiness templates are only available for the premium paying members.

There is also the “custom” tab where you design your own theme if you have strong knowledge of HTML and CSS.

The last tab called “Settings” gives you the ability to change three small things, including: the alignment of your text, the spacing for the work area of your website and the color for your website border.

Style is where you can choose and customize the way that your text looks, what font you want to use, the heading style and so on. The “blog styles” settings apply only if you choose to incorporate a blog to your website.

Blog – pretty self explanatory. Here you can manage all your bog posts.

Upgrade – here you can see an overview of all the features of the 2 premium plans that Jimdo offers: Business and Pro. You can take a look around and see why you might consider to upgrade your membership plan by taking a look at some of the sites that are using a paid plan.

Settings – in this section you will be able to enter in your full details, website details, eCommerce settings, managing your apps or email accounts. I will talk a little about each category and only describe the most important features that you need in order to get the best from your website.

Account – Enter your profile details, profile picture, select the language of the blog (12 available), change your current password or add an alternative email address.

Website – You can edit your site title or footer in order in add more information related to your business. A nice feature is the “Passord-Protected Areas” where you can name and lock certain parts or posts in your website, so only a selected group of people can have accessto them.

“Edit Head” is where you can add custom codes to your website, like your Google Analytics or anything related.

Mobile – Jimdo offers a mobile version of your website for free and you can customize its appearance by selecting a template from “Mobile View”.

Email and Domain Management – These three features are available only for paid members. In case you opt in for a paid plan, this is where you can setup your email accounts and forward them to another account. You can also order and manage your custom domains.

Store – This is where you can setup all your eCommerce settings. Jimdo offers a very good support for online stores and by far the most complete free eCommerce solution from all the website builders we have reviewed until now.

Apps – You can connect your Jimdo website to your Dropbox account, Google Analytics or Twitter account. You can also generate QR Codes with just a few clicks.

SEO – It’s important to check this feature and enter the details for your page, like: the page title, description, and keywords. Without taking care of these fields you will find it harder to rank in search engines.

Statistics – A great feature, but unfortunately is available only to the paid members. Too bad if you ask me.

Help – Don’t overlook this tab because you can get quick answers to most of your Jimdo related questions. A very informative and organized knowledgebase.

Creating/Design Your Homepage

The first thing you will do edit is your header. For this you will click anywhere on the surface of the header and a drop-down menu will show up, like the one below:

Custom Photo – here you can select an image from your computer (or Dropbox account) and add it as a header. You can also adjust the size and crop it so it will fit exactly how you would like.

Pattern – another option in case you don’t really want a photo as your header, but you do want something more minimalist, like an abstract pattern.

Adjust Header – different settings to adjust the position of your header image

Title – beside being able to edit your title, Jimdo offers the possibility to use different fonts, sizes and positions of your title.

Logo – good feature to add a bit more branding to your website, but unfortunately this is only available to the premium members.

After playing a little with all the settings, here is what my chosen header looks like:

When it comes to the first part of building your page, everything is done very easily. You can simply add your desired elements, add the content you wanted and that’s it! You can arrange them how you want by simply dragging them left or right, up or down, until you are satisfied with the looks of it.

When you want to add a new element you just have to click the “+”.

After that, a small menu will pop up showing you what kind of elements you can add to your page. An example is shown on the left side:

For my test I have used the “Text with Photo” elements, then the “Spacing” to separate the page a little from my next set of elements. After that I use “Columns” button to split it in 2 columns where I have inserted a Youtube video and Google Maps for the second column.
For the left sidebar I chose to add a few big social media icons.

So, after just a few minutes, this is the result:

If you want to see what you can achieve in a matter of minutes, just take a look at this Sample Site i have done for this tutorial.
* If you want to listen the short version of this review, be sure to check our Jimdo podcast here.