Jimdo Launches Chinese Version

Hamburg based Jimdo – a critically acclaimed tool to easily create websites – announced the launch of a Chinese version.

China (obviously) is a huge market and Jimdo’s English-language version was already well received in China, so to eliminate the language barrier should be a smart move to attract many more Chinese users. They ran a closed beta of the Chinese version and the 500 available spots were taken in less than 4 hours. Jimdo was localized by MH | direkt who also will provide further support, marketing and community building in China.

It is very easy to use, has a nice AJAX-interface, the created sites are good looking and there are also lots of layouts and designs to choose from. 20,000 Jimdo pages have been created so far, and while the focus lies on “build a website”, you can also use this as a blogging tool. Now there is no shortage of excellent free tools to build websites or to publish on the web which can do that, but Jimdo has a few interesting features which might make them stand out of the crowd:

You can integrate old school features like a guestbook or a contact form, but you also can grab photos from flickr, videos from YouTube, links from del.icio.us or syndicate any feed on your site. Jimdo also allows you to protect single or sets of pages or photos with multiple passwords for different user groups. Regrettably Jimdo does not provide any feeds yet.

Free users are limited by the size of storage (500 MB) and can upgrade to a paid service for 5 Euro/month. This includes your own domain, will remove the ads, gives you 5 GB of storage, advanced statistics and more features.

On a sidenote: Jimdo was one of the first companies from Germany which developed an application for Facebook, so Facebook users can integrate a snapshot of their Jimdo page in their profile. The effects have been promising and they are working on features to fully exploit the viral dynamics of the social graph.