Jimdo

History

Jimdo was founded in February 2007 by Matthias Henze, Christian Springub, and Fridtjof Detzner.

In April 2009, after Yahoo! announced that GeoCities was closing, Jimdo announced that former GeoCities users were welcome on Jimdo. Jimdo started the "Lifeboat for GeoCities" promotion to help users transition to Jimdo. Jimdo offered a 10 percent discount to users who moved from GeoCities and Google Page Creator to the JimdoPro service.

In 2010, Jimdo added a "store" service that allows Jimdo website owners to conduct electronic commerce services. Also in 2010, United Internet withdrew from the company's board. In February 2012, the 5,000,000th Jimdo site went online and in November 2013, the 10,000,000th. As of June 2015, over 15 million websites have been created with Jimdo.

It was announced on June 8, 2015 that the American company Spectrum Equity had invested 25 million euros in Jimdo. With this investment Spectrum Equity now holds a share of 26.7 percent of Jimdo GmbH. In October 2016 Jimdo dismissed a quarter of their staff for economic reasons.

Corporate affairs

The Jimdo head office is in Hamburg, Germany. A United States subsidiary is located in San Francisco. It also has an office located in Tokyo. As of 2015, Jimdo's team consists of 200 people from 15 different countries.

Service

The basic Jimdo service is free; users of the basic service have their website available under a subdomain (for example 'www.yourwebsitename.jimdo.com'). The free service from Jimdo allows the user to build a free basic online store with a maximum of 5 items listed. The two premium services, Jimdo Pro and Jimdo Business, allow users to have their own domain name(s). They also receive additional storage space and no advertisements. Jimdo Pro costs 5 euros per month, and Jimdo Business costs 15 euros per month. As of 2014, there are 8 languages available including: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Dutch and Spanish. The English-language service uses British English. To increase speed performance for their worldwide user base, Jimdo maintains data centers in the US, Germany and Japan.

Mobile applications

Since the beginning of February 2014, the Jimdo-Websitebuilder exists for Android and iOS. This mobile application provides the following functions:

In English-speaking countries the app is marketed under "Jimdo – Website Builder".

Reception

Two months after the service launch in 2007, Rafe Needleman of CNet gave a positive review to Jimdo. Needleman described Jimdo as a "good service for creating a quick site to document a trip or other event, or to prototype a simple personal or business site." He also said that Jimdo was not "mature enough yet" for use by a United States-based small business, "but it's worth keeping track of." More recently, VentureBeat reported on the opening of the US office in San Francisco and the launch of an online store feature, concluding "US readers will probably hear more about the company in the coming months".

U.S./U.K.

On 19 June 2012, Jimdo launched JimdoTV U.S./United Kingdom, an internet television series where Jimdo staff interview Jimdo users. On launch day, Jimdo released a trailer video and the first episode, titled "Drawing with Yuki".

Germany

JimdoTV also launched in Germany. The first episode was released in November 2011 and the latest episode was released in October 2014.

"Drawing with Yuki" was also an episode of JimdoTV Germany. At this was Yuki translated to German during she speaks. All German episodes are available on the Jimdo blog.