Friday, March 16, 2007

Jimdo Web Editor

If you’re looking for an alternative to homepage creation tools a la Google Page Creator, you might be interested to hear that Jimdo.com is now available in English (this startup is not from Silicon Valley, for a change, but from Hamburg, Germany). When you register with them they’ll provide you with a subdomain, like for my test, blogoscoped.jimdo.com. At the bottom of that page you will find a “login” link, and when you drop you password into it, the whole page will switch into a WYSIWYG editing mode.

The editing capabilities overall are quite good, though the usability has some way to go yet. For example, it’s very easy to edit text – just click on it, and a Rich Text box below it will offer you to change it – or change a picture. Or if you like to, you can switch the complete layout of the page with a couple of clicks right on the page itself.

However, I found some important buttons not striking enough to be noticed, and didn’t immediately figure out how to add a new images to the page (it’s the gray plus button that appears when you click on stuff, Jimdo’s Matthias told me). And sometimes you wonder why new editing elements are popping up, instead of the tool allowing you to type right where the text or image or headline is located.

As another example: the close button for dialogs is not included in the top right, but at the bottom, and it doesn’t have an “x”, but an arrow icon. When you’re going head to toes against Google, it’s small things like these which may make users turn away. However, what I really liked about Jimdo is the navigation concept. Google Page Creator lets you start out on a site manager, where you can manage your documents, perform certain actions on them, and so on. With Jimdo on the other hand, you are placed right on “your” homepage, and as long as you remember the login button below, it’s more easy to understand the process – it’s like a wiki in that regard.

Also, because Jimdo immediately creates a whole site structure for you, this may be an interesting tool to create a new homepage almost on the fly. On the other hand, as soon as you want to play around with the site structure, the Google Page Creator approach will be easier to handle. For example, in the editing tools I didn’t find an obvious way to delete the page I was editing at the moment (I’m sure there’s a way, and that way will probably be easy in retrospect).

All in all, an interesting tool, though I think it might face some rough times in the day and age of an all-encompassing “Google Account” (Google Page Creator is part of a web office suite if you will and not a standalone product, and that brings its own set of bonus features – yes, and some additional security problems – for users), and an age where most casual websites simply start out as a (Blogspot) blog instead of a traditional homepage.

[Thanks Matthias!]

Jimdo Web Editor by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (4)

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