We pushed out an update to Jumpchart yesterday. The first, and biggest thing to us, is the newly redesigned sales site. We’ve been using the exact same site since the launch of Jumpchart, and it feels good to finally mix things up a bit. The most important change to those of you who already use Jumpchart will be the long awaited ability to copy projects.

This feature allows you to use existing Jumpcharts as templates to begin new projects with. It’s especially handy for those of you who tend to repeat certain architectures, or modules.

We hope you like the new features.

Jumpchart is really a communication centric tool. It’s designed to be quick for developers to live in, but easy enough for clients to be actively involved in collaboration. If you’re not directly inviting clients to participate in your Jumpcharts you’re missing out on the best part of the process.

When clients can be engaged in the process of defining how their site will work, they’re more likely to be happy with the end product. They feel included in the decision making process, so they have ownership of the site in a way that other planning apps can’t provide. Client involvement in the planning phase leads to:

• Less scope creep
• Less revisions
• Quicker development
• Easier organizing (No digging through email to find where to put stuff)
• Clients who defend the site as their own

That last one is a big one. Defending the site. People have a way of escaping out of controversy. If you deal with clients who have boards of directors, and committees it’s important to have a reliable person on the inside. Someone who defends the work, because they took part in it. Otherwise it’s just another project that nobody is emotionally invested enough in to fight off the corporate nonsense that ruins great websites.

So while Jumpchart is a great tool for individuals to plan websites within the walls of their own office, -you’re missing out on a whole lot of benefit if you’re not involving clients in the process.

We got a support email the other day from a guy who thought Jumpchart was way off base. Usually we don’t take the bait, but we decided to send him a courteous response saying how we respectfully thought he was wrong. Mostly, it was the same arguments we usually get:

• The wireframes aren’t descriptive enough visually
• No way to segregate navigation
• It doesn’t deal with “user experience”

We’ve never argued against any of this for Jumpchart. We tend to believe that the beginning document of a website should be very simple, and not illustrative of divisions of space, but rather what content goes where within a site. The web development industry has a lot of blurry lines between types of specialization. 37Signals thinks that designers should do mark-up. We think that most small studios blur their own lines according to strengths of their staff. Which means there is a diverse set of methods for building websites to appeal to. In our opinion, this means the simpler starting document you have, the more agreeable it will be to individual workflows that can shape it to their own methods. That’s why Jumpchart has the simplest non-descriptive layout imaginable for its wireframe preview.

With Jumpchart, we try to appeal not only to the developers, but to the clients as well. We believe that website planning is a collaborative process. We believe that it should be based around telling the unique story that the client has to offer. Which brings us to the quote from the support email that led to this blog post:

“The process of collection all the information before the information architecture is created is, to my mind, slightly backwards. My view is that information architecture is routed not in the actual information but on the task associated with the information. How the information fits in context with those tasks is where the site IA comes from in my view. IAs, ultimately, are not librarians but architects not organsing each book but creating an environment where those books can best be found and used. That’s the first major philosophical difference I can see.”

Which makes our heads twirl… The idea that the practice of organizing information for websites has advanced to a level where we can ignore the information we’re trying to organize is baffling. Creating a system for the content before you see the content, and then trying to shoe-horn it into place is a recipe for a pending redesign. Jumpchart is about exposing the information that the website needs to present. Doing it in a very simple collaborative way, and doing it quickly. Allowing you to change your mind easily and often, and ultimately getting to the build phase. -Which means getting the “what goes where” approved by the client…

We hope that Jumpchart users are enjoying the freedom to organize content, create navigation, and envision their sites without needing to draw little boxes, or think about whether it’s a 2 column, or a 3 column layout. First thing is first, – and in our opinion, content is king.

One of the most often requested features in Jumpchart launched this afternoon. Sitemaps. It’s been a long time coming, and we’re really glad to be giving it to all of our accounts, both paid, and unpaid. We think the sitemaps will be an invaluable tool to help people understand the full scope of their site, and it’s topology. Nothing makes things clearer than a nice aerial view.

Sitemaps are available on all your existing Jumpcharts via the right hand column tools…

A few things to notice:

• The sitemap is also shareable online, just like the Jumpchart preview.
• When you share a sitemap, and provide the link to someone, they will be able to switch back and forth between sitemap, and wireframe view.
• Each branch of a sitemap can selectively be toggled open and closed.

We hope you like it as much as we do…

If you’re interested in learning more about CSS based sitemaps, check out this article:
http://wordpress.betech.virginia.edu/index.php/2007/10/03/css-sitemap/
It’s what gave us our momentum.

If you’d like to see the sitemap in action, watch this flash movie…
sitemap-tour2

Yesterday afternoon we had the most downtime on Jumpchart that we’ve ever had. For several hours we were offline due to some faulty HD issues. We’re not going to name names, but suffice it to say that for quite some time we haven’t been getting the support from our host that we were hoping for. (more…)

Since launch, we’ve had several requests for better printed pages from Jumpchart. It seems that for some meetings, and some ways of collaborating, -paper just works…

We’ve launched some new print style sheets today that make the output to the printer much more sensical.

If you log in to your Jumpchart homepage, you’ll see a new RSS feed in the sidebar. We’ve added a global comments feed. It will be a handy way for you to keep track of all the comments your clients and coworkers are making if you don’t want to be inundated with email…

Some of you have already shared with us the great projects that have come out of Jumpchart during the beta. It was a great and rewarding experience to hear real user stories of how Jumpchart was making people’s work easier, and better.

We’re still excited to hear from anyone who has Jumpchart stories to tell. If you have a great story, or can point to an example of a project that came from Jumpchart planning, we would love to hear it. Send emails to support@jumpchart.com

We’ve been continuing our busy little process to ramp up for a launch. We’re nailing bugs as fast as we can… Most of them are the kind of thing that only occurs in strange circumstance and are pretty inconsequential in the big scheme. We tackled one yesterday though, that we’re pretty proud of.

If you’ve worked with client content a lot, -you know that clients for some reason LOVE Microsoft Word. Despite all the arguments against it, they send content in a seemingly never-ending series of Word docs. Word has a couple of really irritating features for web designers you’re probably familiar with.

We’re talking about special characters, and the strange little easter egg hunt we as web developers end up doing to find them all. They’re typographically correct, -but maddening. The smart quotes, the ellipsis, the emdash. They all turn into jibber-jabber when pasted into a browser.

Yesterday we supplemented our Textile replacement to fix these common headaches. It’s a small thing, but it will hopefully make all of your lives better if even just a tiny bit. Paste away… Jumpchart will take care of the rest.

If you use comments on Jumpcharts, -you probably receive a lot of emails. Up till now, the default behavior has been to email everyone involved when a new comment is posted.

Today we launched an account wide shut-off for email notifications. Visit the “settings” tab to disable it.