Planning your website with Jumpchart

• design
• planning
• review

Starting out building a new website leaves you with a whole pile of stuff to think about and plan. Generally you get drawn to thinking about how you’d like it to look, and maybe some of the swanky new features you’d like to incorporate. Easily the thing that I get bogged down in though, is the content and the information architecture (what goes where). Maybe it comes easy to some, but for me it feels like a real slog.

To make the process somewhat easier, I came across a product called Jumpchart. As a site design application it really hits the nail on the head – making creating the content and structuring the layout for your site very simple. The interface is clean and minimal which helps to keep you focused on the task of creating content. Best of all the editing interface uses the excellent textile text to markup conversion syntax and this makes writing your content very intuitive.

Using the tool, once you have the content in a state where you would like to have some review by your clients, you can share the project with other users (limited to one other person for the free account). The application includes a useful commenting interface where you can gather client feedback, and make modifications to the site structure and content.

The free account comes with some other limitations such as you are limited to one project, with a max of 10 pages and obviously you aren’t going to be building a massive website with that. It might get you by for the design of a small brochureware site though. An upgrade to a simple plan is available for $5/month which extends the limits sufficiently for individuals using the service, but the super plan ($25/months) is where the action starts to really happen with 100 pages per project, unlimited users, SSL security and a wordpress export available. The wordpress export is definitely the real treat amongst this, and I would really prefer to see that included in the simple plan (even if the simple plan was a little dearer).