Jimdo: Free DIY Online Website Creator Finds Its China Niche

“Pages to the People” is the slogan for Jimdo, and online DIY website creation service, and they’ve been successful bringing webpage and blog development to the masses.  Since August 2007, Jimdo has empowered less technical users to create sites with pictures, text, RSS, video, and customized design through its straightforward interface. Websites are built completely online and do not require any knowledge of HTML. The intuitive user interface provides users with the freedom to customize their sites with just a few clicks.

Jimdo started as a group of three friends selling basic site creation tools for businesses. The site’s innovative array of creation tools has since developed into a consumer version available in seven different languages (English, Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Italian, Spanish and Russian). Jimdo hosts JimdoFree sites with “dot Jimdo” URL addresses, limited storage and integrated ads. JimdoPro, the premium version, allows users to host their own pages with more storage and no ads.

Almost immediately after launching, Jimdo brought it’s Pages to China by way of George Godula, who attended university with one of the company’s founders. Seeing the huge potential of the site for China’s small companies–most of which do not have a Web presence–George and Web2Asia, a market entry consultancy firm he runs out of Shanghai, jumped at the opportunity to fill the gap in the market. There were over 31.5 million small companies in Mainland China in 2006. Reports indicate that the total number of small to medium sized enterprises will reach 50 million by 2012. Currently, around 70-80% of these small companies do not have a corporate website, with high costs being the main inhibitor for them to be online: fees range from 2,000 – 10,000 RMB. Small companies also lack the resources to have professional technicians for the maintenance of their sites. Clearly there was a great demand for easy, inexpensive, DIY site creators in China.

In just two years, Jimdo has been used to create over 100,000 personal and business sites in China. Jimdo was instrumental in expanding the reach of businesses and in providing a means by which people in China can connect with more people. Check out the site of this 70-year-old retired teacher, who despite not being able to pronounce Jimdo is one of its biggest fans.

JimdoPro landing page

Coming to China was not without difficulties and setbacks. Jimdo competes with large Chinese players like Sina and Sohu in the personal space/blogging market. Stiff competition also comes from other DIY site creators, with the biggest being state-owned and backed NET.cn. According to George, a key lesson in localization for Jimdo was to “prepare for a much longer timeframe than for other countries.” As such, it was imperative to manage the expectations of headquarters in Germany: ROI will take time. Taking the local situation and preferences into account, the China team found that scaling Jimdo required targeting the business community. Unlike Europe, where private users tend to spend more money for their personal websites, it is much different in China where free options for websites are plentiful. People were not interested in paying for JimdoPro pages. For small businesses, however, there was great appeal in affordable professional-looking websites that were easy to set up and maintain.

The company is now undergoing a total shift in strategy, targeting businesses more because Jimdo offers a low priced solution for this market. Jimdo gets businesses on board with its new landing page which includes video on the features and benefits of the product. It also beefed up its marketing efforts in three key channels: 1) paid keywords on search engines, 2) affiliate and resesller program and 3) BBS marketing and online PR.

“Content management was one of the hardest lessons learned,” says Sam Fan, Jimdo Country Manager in China. The Chinese government’s censors blocked the site for three weeks in its first few weeks of operation because content deemed inappropriate and vulgar was found on Jimdo-hosted sites. Jimdo is now vigilant about user content control, putting filters in place to swap out controversial words.

The team at Jimdo China continues to localize and tweak the product for the Chinese market. With the help of BloggerInsight and its network of expert techies, Jimdo was able to pinpoint exactly what needed to be changed for local users.  For example, while the current design templates were positively received, Chinese users did not like the fact that they were pre‐populated with content that they had to delete before personalizing it themselves. This problem will be remedied soon.

Jimdo user interface

Jimdo China’s still got much to do. In the pipeline are plans to implement more features to make the site more business-focused, encouraging even more of China’s small enterprises to build their web presence through Jimdo. There will also be improvements to user experience such as web-based restore points for backing up content. Expansion in Asia continued with a successful launch in Japan through KDDI Web Communications, a subsidiary of Japan’s second largest telecommunication corporation KDDI. The Japan deal is Jimdo’s first with a publicly traded company. More Asian countries are in the works.

Even new start ups can go global and bring their product to China. If you have the right technology and the right niche, making the move to China might be a good idea. Of course, you need to have have your eyes and ears on the ground to get a good idea of the market realities; Jimdo’s got the right idea with support from headquarters in Germany and its team in Shanghai.

Contributions by @MikeFung and Ying Xue