Archive for the ‘Jumpchart’ Category

Demo or Don’t!

Have you ever had a moment where you’re sitting there eating lemon pie and thinking about the moon and then you’re like, “what even is the moon?” And so you start calling all of your friends and asking them questions like, “do you think the moon was actually part of earth?” and “Isn’t it wild that it takes the moon the same amount of time to rotate on its axis and orbit the earth?” and then you wonder whether the other side of the moon has a different face and whether that face is actually  a reflection of your own soul. And then you look down and all the lemon pie is gone and your puppy is running through the house, full of pie and happiness.

Many moons ago, the first version of Jumpchart was sort of like a little cuddly baby. We loved it, of course. We cooed it to sleep at night. We washed its hair with lotion. We fed it a lot of words and hugs and lemon juice. Cut to today: Jumpchart is no longer a baby. Now it’s a bit more sophisticated. Now it wears fancy white fancy pants and reminds us of a bit of our favorite vintage goods, only sleeker. Now we go around showing pictures of Jumpchart to people who don’t even know us and we say things like, “but look! Doesn’t Jumpchart’s hair look like white diamonds?”

Anyhoo. We built an all new interface for Jumpchart, and we’re letting a few people try it out. If you want to be one of them, sign up here:

Sign up to try the Jumpchart demo.

It’s Our Birthday and We’ll Celebrate if We Want to

It’s finally here. The day we’ve been waiting for. The one we’ve been dreaming about. Today, on the 29th of September in the 2015th year of the Gregorian calendar, Jumpchart turns 8. Ocho. Otto. VIII. Stay a moment to hear all about how we were birthed (we spared you the gross details. Promise!)

In a land far far away in a place that looks a little bit like the world does today, there existed something that we used to call paper [pey-per]. Paper was a tool that people used to write with. For centuries upon centuries, men and women and boys and girls lost hours upon hours searching for the single paper that they needed to send to their friend or colleague.

The world continued like this until, one day, a little boy came along and thought, “there’s gotta be a better way.” So he invented what he called the “folder.” It was a little accordian-like tool that was used to house documents.

As young bucks, we used to go to that boy’s house and play a game called, “I call out a folder and you run around the folder library looking for it until you find it and once you find it, you pull it out and give it to me so I can open it and use the documents.”

Despite the long title, it was quite a fun game. But after years and years of this, and after papercut after papercut, that little boy (who was now a venerable grandpapa) decided to abandon his charts and papers and collaborative tools (jump ship, really), and dedicate his life to clementine farming.

In 1984, we scooped up the dream and we put it in a little jar and we watered it every day with love and hope and milk (whatever, dreams like milk!). Finally, 8 years ago, we looked and noticed that our dreams were too big to stay in the jar. So we put them online, where they could be safe.

Jumpchart grew a little bit in these 8 years, and we’ve done some cool stuff. Like all the other 8 year olds you know. Only Jumpchart lives inside a computer and not your house. Oh yeah, and Jumpchart doesn’t scream at you to get us a bowl of cereal every morning, so that’s gotta count for something. Check out our stats.

  • Users: 132k
  • Projects: 192k
  • Pages: 1.6m (That’s right. Million!)


Fun Stuff You Didn’t Need to Know But Now You Know:
  • Jumpchart users are most active on Tuesdays. They create about 309 thousand pages that day.
  • Our single most loyal active user has been with us since September of 2008, and they have over 7 thousand pages written!
  • The largest project in the app has 2315 pages.
  • Saturday (not Sunday) is the slowest day for page creation.


Now if you get asked to partake in a fun battle of Jumpchart Jeopardy, you can win. Follow us on twitter for a chance to win a birthday gift (with love, from us to you!)

Happy Holidays!

Hey everyone! Once again the holiday break is upon us. It’s been an amazing year, but truth be told we’re ready for some good old fashioned downtime. We’ll be out of the office from December 24th until January 5th. Our response time might be a bit slower than usual during the break, so thank you for your understanding.

If you have an emergency during that time, though, just shoot us an e-mail – we’ll do our best to get you taken care of as quickly as we can.

Happy Holidays!

- Paste

Jumpchart for Writers: Plan More Than Website Content.

A big part of what I do at Paste and Entermotion is write. I write website content for our clients, so I practically live inside Jumpchart anyway. Jumpchart is a great tool for writers for lots of reasons, but I’ve found additional uses for it, and I thought you might find them helpful, too.

The Old Way

Before, during and after the website architecture/content creation jobs, I’m writing other stuff, too, like blog articles, support documentation, internal communication, and newsletters. I used to have my own external system to keep track of research and notes for these projects. I won’t lie, it was messy. It involved a notebook here, a spreadsheet there, a list of URLs in an email somewhere else. One day, after searching for half an hour for a page in my notebook containing some crucial interview information, I knew something had to change. I needed an app, a tool, something to keep all my crap in one place. Then it dawned on me that I already had the perfect tool for this type of organization. Ever since my “duh” moment, I use Jumpchart for pretty much everything.

Blog Articles

When I write for blogs, my drafts all begin in Jumpchart. Yes, even this one! To streamline the process, I created a project titled “Blog Articles.” Then I made three primary pages, one for each of the blogs I write for. I decided to get even more specific to help with my (dis)organization. I broke my subpages for each blog into four sections: In Progress, Out for Review, Edits Needed, and Published. With this system, I can quickly see the status of each article. For me, this makes it really easy to jump right in on actual work without having to try and remember where each article is in the publication process. The best part? Organizing is done by drag and drop. It literally doesn’t get any easier. Keep Reading

Content is King (and yes, the crown does blend)

blendtec

The Blendtec videos were viewed over six million times within five days of their posting on YouTube and on Blendtec’s website. They’ve been viewed more than 100 million times since.

Keep Reading

New Jumpchart Features

You may have noticed we recently launched some updates to Jumpchart. We wanted to cover a few of the highlights in case you missed them.

Improved Print Styles
If you’re like us, you like to print things sometimes – helps to have something physical to mark up, and it gets old looking at the screen all day. Now your printout look more like what’s on your screen – with content and navigation organization fit to show clients if you so choose. We also eliminated all the extra browser elements that tend to crowd a page.

blog-jc-print-styles

Export to PDF
Introducing one more way to share projects with collaborators and clients (in addition to inviting them to the project, or showing them a public wireframe, of course). Now you can export the full project to a PDF – and send that file however you’d like; via email, physical copy, zip drive – whatever. As you know, a PDF holds its formatting across browsers, and even operating systems. No matter how outdated your client’s computer is, they’ll see what you see.

Sitemap Printing Support
Now the sitemap is easier to print, too. The new graphically enhanced sitemap will show the organization of your project in a succinct layout you can pitch to anyone.

blog-jc-sitemap

Export to Drupal
Jumpchart already supported WordPress exports – the most popular CMS on the web. Now we’re supporting another one of the biggies – Drupal. Your full site export is now only one click away.

Focus on Content
A clean screen is a must. Now you can zone in on the task at hand by eliminating all other elements on the page. You can even choose to work on a light or dark colored background. Don’t worry, your editing menu will still be accessible with a quick click.

Dumpster Divers – Rejoice!
Just because something is in the trash doesn’t mean it actually belongs there. If you’ve ever accidentally deleted a page (and all its subpages…), you know the feeling of panic that immediately ensues. Now, recovering your “lost” content is as easy as reaching into the trash and pulling it out.

blog-jc-deleted-pages

The More, the Merrier
Add another win for efficiency – now you can invite multiple collaborators to your project at once. There’s plenty of room in the invitation field – and you can still add a personal message to them.

Feedback. When to Get it, When to Avoid it, and How Jumpchart Helps Keep Track of it All.

If you’re using Jumpchart, you’re probably organizing content for a website project. And if you’re working on a website project, you probably know you’ll have to get feedback… at some point.

The hard part is deciding when. Early? Before you get into the nitty gritty? Or later? After you’ve already done the hard stuff? There are pluses and minuses to both. But because you’re using Jumpchart, you’re lucky… you can go either way and still stay on track. Here’s how.

Getting Feedback Early.


Picture this. You have big ideas for this site. You can’t wait to get started, but you’re working really closely with your client. Your idea of a partnership is a give and take – and that means feedback every step of the way. So you work through the architecture of the new site; that’s your step one. Maybe it goes something like this. Once you have that knocked out, it’s time to show your client. You have two options for letting your client see it. You can either invite them to the project (with full access, or read-only access – your choice!), or show them the public link to the site map. Inviting them to the project allows them to make comments on each page. Those comments will stay with you throughout the project’s existence, so you can always refer back to them to make sure you’re staying on the right track. You either get instant approval, or you and your client work through initial revisions together. Then you move on to the page-level content. Since you’ve already shown your client, they have access to your progress, and can provide feedback as you go. Your project progresses at a pace you’re both happy with, and as always, you can refer back to notes because they’re right there in your Jumpchart project. Keep Reading

Should You Care About Content Strategy?

I’m a big fan of putting words before pixels, but I’m aware that only gets you as far as launch. What do you do after the big red button has been pushed, and the whole world knows about your website?

Keep adding content. How? By developing a content strategy. This is totally a 30,000 foot view of what content strategy really looks like, but there are others who do a much better job of getting down to the gory details. In a nutshell, figure out a plan that answers these questions: How will you let people know you exist? Will you blog? Will you tweet? What will you say? Can you pull this off using one voice? Have one underlying message? Keep Reading

Before You Plan Content, You Have to do This.

You’ve heard it here, you’ve heard it everywhere: content comes first. But that’s actually not entirely true. There’s something even more important that comes before content. It often gets lumped in with the content planning phase, but I think it’s important enough to have a blog article all its own.

Architecture.

You know, the real backbone of the site. This is actually my favorite part of planning a site (nerd alert, I know) because it forces me to really focus on what the site’s purpose is. Kicking off content creation for a project, I have a bunch of notes scribbled in my notebook: headline ideas, tone concepts, calls to action, or things the client has mentioned they want included. It starts to pile up on my desk, but before I pay attention to any of it, I put together the thing that will tie all that chicken scratch together.  Keep Reading

You’re on Board with the Content First Approach. Are Your Clients?

Kristin 10/01/13
Jumpchart

I usually don’t talk about client interactions, but this time I’m going to make an exception. An exception that will hopefully help close the bridge between you and clients who can’t wait to get to the sparkly design stage.

When you explain to your client that you work with a content first approach, you might be met with a raised eyebrow. You might feel like you have to defend your process – but you don’t! Instead, educate them. Convince them. Remind them that their project is going to turn out great, and this is why.

When you invite someone to a Jumpchart project, you have the option to include a personal message with the invitation. We have some default content there that explains what Jumpchart is, and I think a variation of it can be used in this situation, too.

Here’s the content as it stands in Jumpchart now:

You’ve probably heard us mention Jumpchart in bits of our conversations- here’s a little more information on it as we move forward. Keep Reading

Paste Interactive is a small app studio that makes cool, smart tools to help next generation workers work better, simpler, and faster.
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