Jimdo Pro review

Jimdo made a bit of a splash back in 2009 when it offered its services as a lifeboat for users of Geocities, the free webhosting service closed down by Yahoo. Like Geocities used to, Jimdo offers a free hosting account and site-building tool.

The free hosting service is limited to 500MB server space (enough for most personal sites), but we tested the Pro account, which costs £5 per month. For this, you get 5GB server space, a store with PayPal integration, the ability to password-protect certain pages and the option to add interactive features such as a blog, a guestbook and an RSS feed. You can either choose to use a free Jimdo web address, for instance mysite.jimdo.com, or register a domain of your own. Domain registration is included in the price of the package.

The site builder takes a WYSIWYG approach to construction and when you first log on, you’re presented with a list of templates. Apply one to your site and you can then drag and drop elements onto the page, move them around and edit their content. Although it has its limitations, the quality was impressive and we can imagine producing a site that we would be happy showing to the world using this tool.

We agonised for some time over Jimdo’s score. If we were judging purely on the features alone (server space, database support and so on) Jimdo would get only two stars. Where Jimdo scores well is offering an easy way for novices to quickly get a good-looking page online. However, while this would earn an extra star or two, you may as well opt for the free version. Plus, Jimdo is a bit cheeky. If you sell using an online shop, it levies a 5 per cent sales fee on every item sold (10 per cent if you're using the free package). That might be acceptable if the hosting plan was incredibly cheap and the extra fee was a way of keeping it so, but it’s more expensive than plenty of others out there. If you don’t plan to sell online and want only a basic site, opt for Jimdo Free.