Jimdo: Another super-simple site builder

After I covered Weebly, I got a note from the creator of Jimdo, another easy-to-use Web site creator tool. I took it for a quick spin, and I'm somewhat impressed. It has a lot of very strong features, it makes pretty sites, and it's free.

The service is especially good at handling photos. It does a great job displaying photos that you upload to it, and it also integrates beautifully with Flickr. There are good options for how the galleries are displayed, and when you zoom into a picture, it displays over the page instead of taking you off-site. It does great slide shows.

Signing up for the service is really easy and creating new pages is a snap as well. Like other modern site design and hosting services, it has a collection of attractive templates, and you can apply one, and change the whole look of your site, in an instant.

It took me a few more minutes to get comfortable with Jimdo's site-building interface than it did with Weebly, and there are some rough edges that you might find frustrating. It's run out of Germany, and there are foreign-looking elements to it. For instance, spelling on the site is British ("favourite" vs. "favorite") when it's not German (the "forgot your password" text is "Passwort vergessen?" I couldn't find a way to resize my site's title graphic once it was imported. And while the site will display RSS feeds, in my tests it did not display a feed's pictures. All minor things, but frustrating.

This is a good service for creating a quick site to document a trip or other event, or to prototype a simple personal or business site. I don't think it's mature enough yet to put a U.S.-based small business on, but it's worth keeping track of. The basic Jimdo service is free. If you pay 5 euros a month for Jimdo Pro, you can use your own domain name (instead of site.jimdo.com), you get more storage, and the ads are removed.