What is the crowd's opinion of Jimdo?

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One possibility is Jimdo I've seen it handed off successfully to a relative webnoob.

I'd have reservations totally handing other solutions off. Both Concrete5 and Joomla have some pretty good extensions specifically for clients, to handle simple pic and text updates. But updating the site or fixing something big is pretty unrealistic. Either they lose the pass and hire someone to build a new site or they let it sit. Jimdo does a pretty good job with it's interface, it solves some of the stuff a client would have to call you for again and again.

The hard part is getting them to look at the web as something that needs frequent attention, versus the attitude "Uh oh. I've got to update the website and that scares me", that causes paralysis.

I would recommend you to use a website builder like ours own-free-website.com or those of our larger competitors wix.com or jimdo.com

Website builders make sense for quite simple structured websites and make your life easier, even if you could do it without a website builder.

But it depends - if you have fun building the website completely on your own and want to be as flexible as possible, coding it by yourself makes sense, sure. In this case I'd strongly recommend you to use php or some kind of cms like wordpress or so, as it will make it much easier for your friend to update his website on his own.