The website creation firm Jimdo has released an iOS app so users can create and manage their sites from their iPhones and iPads.
This is functionality that some of Jimdo’s rivals have in part, but the company claims to offer a more comprehensive package: Weebly‘s iPhone app lets you manage a site but not create one; and Zapd is iPhone-only and Simpl iPad-only while Jimdo works across both devices and the desktop. So Jimdo is really the only one that lets you create a site from the mobile device before fleshing it out on the desktop.
“We basically ported the way you edit a Jimdo website to iOS and optimized it for touch devices,” Jimdo co-founder Matthias Henze told me, noting that an Android version was coming soon.
The app is free to use but it gains more functionality if you subscribe to Jimdo Pro ($ 90/year) or Business ($ 240/year) – both let you use your own domain and give you an email account and statistics, and Business adds unlimited storage, more email accounts and so on (a full comparison can be found here).
While its mobile-centric rivals tend to focus on creating social sites, Jimdo has a lot of small business customers – a major part of the new app is the ability to check stats and tweak the site from the sofa, or take pictures of new products with the device’s camera and upload them.
Jimdo hasn’t integrated its ecommerce module into the app yet, but the basic building blocks are there for those who want to start from scratch: heading, text, images, image galleries, and text with images. “Now we’re going to see what the users’ demand is,” Henze said.
We previously covered Jimdo for its unusual refusal of millions in funding — it wanted to think long-term instead of heading for an exit. And the company is indeed growing at a healthy pace: in March the six-year-old firm boasted 8 million websites built on its platform, and now Henze says the number is near 10 million.
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