A few weeks back I received an invite to check out JumpChart.com, a tool designed for the quick gathering, editing and deployment of web content. Ironically, we’ve discussed building a tool very much like JumpChart; to assist us with our client content gathering woes. JumpChart beat us to the punch and they did a great job executing the overall application.

Imulus is just like every other agency / development house out there who is frustrated with trying to gather client content for web projects. Typically we start with a timeline which is dead-on and very achievable, yet the project gets delayed because client has under-estimate the amount of work which goes into content writing, gathering and editing. The second part of that problem is the client’s inability to visualize the content they are tossing over the fence in Word, Excel, and PDF format.

JumpChart goes a long way toward solving these problems. The interface is intuitive and extremely useful for quickly building web structures. It took me 10 minutes to layout the structures of a 30 page site. And it took me another 15 minutes to copy & paste in all the client’s content. The resulting effort produced a clickable website skeleton which was publicly accessible by the client. It quickly became apparent to the client that there was much work which needed to be completed before the site could go live. By stripping out information architecture and content from the actual design, it forces the client to evaluate their content structures, page lengths and overall voice before that content is formated and embedded in the website.

Once the client has signed-off on the JumpChart content you can export all the goods in CSS / HTML which can later be imported into your favorite content management system.

To really do this service justice I suggest visiting their website and looking at the video tours. http://www.jumpchart.com/video-tour/