Mashable

“The design behind Jumpchart is to make it easier for graphic designers, web publishers and developers to create sitemaps for themselves and clients. Some of its features include the ability to add pages, sub-pages, and content. Move entire sections of a webpage around, and interlink different pages to offer a better mockup that leaves little to the imagination.”

Web Worker Daily

“A huge part of building or improving any web site comes in the site mapping stage. I’m always amazed at the varying kinds of tools that web workers use to do site design, and I even know one top designer who does all his prototyping in Excel—because he likes it. I have a new favorite tool for site mapping, and it’s Jumpchart.”

Solution Watch

“Diagrams play a very important role in planning and communicating a site’s architecture. They help you visualize a project before developing and piecing things together, leading to smarter design decisions. Unfortunately, for a client, Information Architecture and diagrams can be very intimidating, not to mention appear impractical. Because of this, many web teams end up leaving a client out of the whole process and resort to other means of learning what they want on their website. The end result? A mess of emails, Word documents, links to websites, and so on. Jumpchart, currently in private beta, hopes to put an end to all of this.”

Webware

“Then there’s Jumpchart, which makes it very easy to prototype the navigation and basic elements of a site, and to collect feedback from other people working on the design project.”

Rev2.org

“Jumpchart is an interactive collaborative wireframe service from Paste Interactive designed to help web developers and content creators working together building the architecture of a website. The problem with the traditional website organization process, as described by the developers of Jumpchart, is that they are not interactive, and don’t carry momentum into the build phase. Jumpchart replaces the typical paper flowcharts, sitemaps, and wireframes website builders are accustomed to using.”

Jumpchart Launches!
We’re pleased as punch to announce that Jumpchart is out of beta, and fully public. Thanks to everyone for bearing with us during the development bugs. Just a reminder, all of you that signed up before today will have an extended 3 free months to continue using Jumpchart for free.

Revised pricing
We got a lot of feedback on the pricing… Most of it positive luckily. Many of the emails revolved around the page limit on the Super account, and the file size on the Simple. In an effort to suck up to all of our new users, -we’re bumping the Super account max pages from 50, to 100, and increasing the file size from 25Mb to 50 Mb on the Simple.

Blog posts = free month
Quite a few of you have taken us up on our request for blog posts, and publicity for Jumpchart. A few really well written articles have especially been making us blush. To all of you who wrote to us announcing what you did to promote Jumpchart, -we’ve got an additional free month for you. To anyone wishing to help promote the launch of Jumpchart, -you can get a free month as well… Just do something special to get the word out, and shoot us an email to let us know. We’ll continue to accept throughout the month of October.

• Thanks to one of our users, Dana, we have added a photo placeholder to the Textile markup. Just like [lipsum] works for text, [photo] works for images… Give it a shot.

• Some of our IE6 users have been complaining about hard to read fonts. We’ve replaced the font for IE6 users with Verdana, which renders much more reliably. Since we all work on Macs, we sometimes forget how un-smooth fonts render on Windows.

• When mocking up forms, [file] is now a valid Textile option for creating file input fields.

Airbag has a nice post on the misconceptions people have about website organization. We recommend reading it yourself, but the post basically talks about a client referring to sections of websites as “buckets.” Greg doesn’t make a specific judgment that “buckets” are bad terminology for sections, only that it’s probably representative of an underlying misunderstanding.

“From what I can tell this has happened as the result of more and more clients taking on the role of information architect. In the last two years almost half of our clients have come to us finished site map in hand and eager to drop the B-bomb. I don’t believe that’s the result of failure on the part of web designers and developers but the client believing that they know what works for them. A few months ago we pushed back on sitemap generated by a client. Before coming to us they formed an ad hoc group and met for six weeks to re-categorize their existing site into a new, mythical world of Bucketopia.”

This passage is what really caught our attention. It reminds us of our previous post about collaboration. It’s a strange world these days. People have access to information, and tools that only experts could use 10 years ago. Heck, 2 years ago… What this is leading to is not the mythical world of Bucketopia that Greg refers to, but rather a severely itchy case of expert-itis. Now it seems that anyone with a few dollars to buy Photoshop LE is a designer, and anyone with Office is a copy writer. People think because they have the tools they can do the work.

For those of you with beta access, we would really appreciate some feedback as we ramp up for a launch. (still some loose ends, but we’re getting closer all the time)

We were having a recurring issue with where to place the main edit button. Wherever we put it, it would be inaccessible in certain scenarios. Of course it was just a scroll away, -but it felt inconvenient.

Yesterday we launched the new feature we’ve been working on. It’s a small thing, but we expect it to make a big impact on the way people use Jumpchart. It’s called snippets, and it helps you to never have to do things twice.

We know how clients work… -they change their mind often. Give yourself a way to make quick sitewide changes by creating a snippet. Snippets are great for repeated chunks of text, and small bits of functionality that need repeated throughout the site

See it in action here

An article on Zeldman made us think about Jumpchart in a new way today.

For about a year now we’ve been designing on spec. Jumpchart is the spec work, and you’re the client. We took a giant blind guess that you might use it. It’s tough to work for free. Never knowing if your client will actually ever like, -or pay for your service. What keeps you going is your own drive for completion, and the hope that you just might be right.

In the design business spec work is the devil. We would never even consider it. But it’s exactly what we’ve been doing for almost a year now.

No shortage of other options for wireframing on Boxes and Arrows today.

PDF Prototypes: Mistakenly Disregarded and Underutilized
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/pdf-prototypes
by Kyle Pero Soucy

Creating a clickable PDF to prototype a new design is not a new concept, but it is a valuable tool that is often overlooked and underutilized. While working over the years with other designers, information architects and usability professionals, I’ve noticed that many of my colleagues believe the same fallacies about the limitations of PDFs. Contrary to popular belief, you can do more than just create links and interactive forms with PDFs; you can also add dynamic elements such as rollovers and drop-down menus, embed audio and video files, validate form data, perform calculations and respond to user actions.

Interactive Prototypes with PowerPoint
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/interactive
by Maureen Kelly

Have you ever wished your early design mockups could come to life, so you could try out the navigation, test an interaction, or see if a button label just feels right when you click on it?

Sure, you could invest in a dedicated prototyping tool, but you can create surprisingly quick and effective prototypes with a software program that’s probably sitting on your hard drive right now. It’s PowerPoint—and no, I am not kidding.

It would have been nice to know about these options a couple years ago. Today, we can’t help but think Jumpchart solves these problems in a more functional way. The more abstracted an idea is, the less useful it becomes. There is simply no way to turn these dead mockups into a website… Once they’re approved, they’re trash.

Also, Jumpchart brings something else to the table… -Your clients. Giving clients the ability to directly contribute to the evolution of content is a powerful thing. It commits them to the process, and saves you work.

No matter how you work, -even if you start out in Powerpoint or Acrobat, Jumpchart can have a place in your workflow. At some point, all of your content has to be translated into a format a developer can use. No matter how much fiddling you choose to do beforehand.