Pricing is always an interesting topic when it comes to online site builders.
First, if the price is high, you may be wondering, “what do I get if I pay this high price?” and “is the price is justified?”
On the other hand, if the price is too low, you may wonder, “is the quality of the site builder high enough?” or “are there hidden costs involved somewhere?”
After writing so many articles related to big online site builders, like Wix, Weebly, or Jimdo, I thought that it was time to figure out what was going on outside of these big players.
Weebly and Jimdo provide flexible ways to work with web templates (to learn more about these, check out my Weebly website templates and Jimdo templates tutorials)
But when we talk about online website builders, it is crazy not to mention Wix.
Jimdo has flexible features when it comes to working with website themes. So, in this post, I cover what the Jimdo templates are, how to change them during the website creation process, and how to modify them.
It makes sense to divide the themes into different categories for better browsing experience, and indeed, this is what Jimdo does. The categories are divided into All, Business, Store, Portfolio and Personal. When you enter the themes page, you’ll automatically land to All category.
Two things are noticeable when you look at the Jimdo templates page.
First, when you land the All category, it shows you only 16 themes total (At the time of writing. However, the number of templates is higher, thanks to variations of given template). This is less than when compared to Weebly or Wix.
Second, you also have the Blank Template option, where you can design the template yourself, by using the Jimdo Editor.
So how does one choose a template, then? Simple! Hover your mouse over the preferred theme, and click Choose This Template button:
After clicking the Choose This Template button, you’ll have to go through various steps before you can have the selected template on your site.
I’ll go through the full process of picking a template later in this post.There are four ways when it comes to working with Jimdo templates:
This post focuses the first three options.
The fourth, customizing the theme by yourself (using code), is outside the scope of this post. However, I’ll touch it briefly later in this post. Sometime in the future, I’ll write a detailed post on how to create the template yourself, by using HTML and CSS.One obvious time when you interact with Jimdo templates is when you create a new website from scratch. Currently, this operation goes as follows:
1) Log into your Jimdo dashboard, and click the blue button with text Create a new website:
2) Next, pick the type of site you want to create. For this demonstration I chose Website, and then I clicked the Create a website button:
3) On the next page, you’ll be asked to select the industry your site belongs to. Alternatively, you can skip over this selection:
In practice, whether I selected an industry or not, it didn’t have any effect on the templates I was offered on the next step. So, no matter what you choose, you’ll still see the page, where you pick can the template for your site:
4) Hover your mouse over the preferred template, and click Select this template button:
5) The next page shows you the plan you want to create your site with. In this case, I chose the Free plan for this demonstration, and clicked Get started:
6) Next, you’ll have to hook your new site to a domain, so this is what you are going to do next:
For this demo, I choose the Free Domain option, by entering a random name, and clicking Check the availability:
Once the check is done, and no other site with a similar name is found, click the Create a free website link.
7) Jimdo starts creating your site, and once it’s ready, it’s opened in the editor. There you can start editing it for your needs:
Ok, so you have created a website, but now you have second thoughts: perhaps your site would look better with a different template?
No worries! With Jimdo, you can change the template, even if you built your site with a different template in the first place.
Changing a template is straightforward:1) Log in to your Jimdo dashboard.
2) Choose the theme you want to work with, by hovering over it, and clicking the theme.
You may have also noticed, that there are three dots at the bottom-right of the theme. When you click them, you get to see the following items:
3) Once you have chosen a particular site for editing, click Menu at the top navigation bar and choose Design:
4) Once the Design link is clicked, another view opens. This view helps you to choose different settings related to your site’s design. In this case, choose the Templates link:
5) You see all the possible themes you can choose from:
6) When you pick any of the themes, you’ll see additional options to choose from. In this case, you can either preview the theme, to see how it looks, or click the variations icon, to show the different variations of a given theme:
For instance, if you wanted to see the variations of this particular theme, here is what you see on Bordeaux theme:
7) Once you have chosen the theme you’d like, just click on the theme thumbnail. You’ll enter a preview mode. Confirm your theme selection by clicking the Save button:
8) If you still want to alter the styles of your site, you can also click Style or Background links at the top:
9) If you want to see how your website looks with different devices, just click any of the icons on the top-right:
10) Your template has now been changed.
Jimdo includes one special template you can use, to create the theme you want. This template is called a Blank template, and it can be found at the end of the templates list.
For this demonstration, I’m not going to repeat the same steps as in section Building a New Website, as the steps here are somewhat similar. However, let’s hop right in in the part where the template selection is made.1) Choose the blank template from the template list (at the end), by clicking the blue Select this template button:
2) Pick the Jimdo Plan.
3) Pick the name for your new site.
4) Jimdo creates the website for you, and opens it in the editor:
5) What you do next is that you either start adding new elements to your site, by clicking the Add Element button. Once you have done that, you’ll see elements that you can add to your site:
Alternatively, to help you out (and if you are stuck), you can use the Suggested Layouts feature, which gives you some ready-thought layouts for your site:
Ok, so there is another option to find the right template for your needs and this feature is called Template Filter. It helps you to select a right theme for your site, based on the layout elements that a theme contains.
To find the Template Filter, you can either go to Template Filter page directly:
There you can filter the themes based on the elements you want to see on your template.
For instance, in this next picture, I filtered all the themes that had dropdown navigation in them, and I got 14 results:
Alternatively, you can also access the Template Filter by logging in to your account and changing your current theme (see the steps on Changing a Theme for an Existing Site). Then, when you see the theme selection at the top of the page, just scroll horizontally to right end, and click Find the perfect template link.
You’ll be then taken to the Template Filter page. There you’ll have to click the blue Click for the Template Filter button, to access the actual template filter:
To add more flexibility to your Jimdo templates, you can always create your own custom template if you are competent with HTML and CSS.
To get started with this option, follow the route I’m explaining next.1) Log in to your account and choose an existing site.
2) Choose Custom Template from Menu > Design > Advanced:
3) Do the changes you want with HTML and CSS, and click the Save button:
4) Before your changes are in effect, you’ll enter a Preview mode, where you can see your modifications and either accept them by clicking Yes, cancelling them by hitting No, or by clicking Back, to get back to the editor view:
To learn more about the Jimdo custom templates, please go to the Custom Template blog post, that Jimdo provides:
So, what if you don’t like the templates that Jimdo offers? Do you want to create your site from scratch, either by coding it with HTML and CSS or by creating it by using the blank template option?
Well, there is at least one place to find premium Jimdo templates, and that’s Matrix Themes. It contains plenty of great-looking themes which you can use with your Jimdo site.
Please note that I haven’t tested this provider myself, so I can’t tell you anything else about it right now.
Jimdo offers flexible ways of working with page templates: You can change them in the middle of the website creation project or customize them the way you want.
One thing that I would like to see is the option to create a template of your own, from scratch. This is not possible, at least for now.
Finally, if you think that none of the options mentioned above sound good to you, go to online theme sites like Matrix Themes to find alternative Jimdo templates.
I remember when I built my first website in 1996. It was exhilarating to learn HTML and eventually have your site uploaded online. And yes, back then we only had HTML since CSS arrived late to the party.
When I think about my first site, it was, ahem, exciting-looking. The reason why I say this is because all the pages had a different look. You could try to use a technique called SSI (Server Side Includes) to make the pages look a bit more uniform, but that was it.