I just came across a pretty cool web app called Jumpchart. Basically it enables you to easily plan the content for your website (or more likely a client’s site).

When you first create a new site, you’re presented with the following screen:

Hovering over the content of the page will bring up the edit button. Once you click edit, you can make changes to the content of your page using Textile markup for formatting.

In the edit screen, there’s a handy sidebar of Textile shortcuts that pops up. Clicking one of these shortcuts will insert that tag into your content. Adding headings, lists, links, or form elements is as simple as clicking a shortcut. Once I saved the page shown above, I can see all my changes:

You can also attach comments or files to a page, making it easy to work with your clients on building their site.

Jumpchart also supports a couple more really cool features:

• Create pages and sub-pages. You can drag and drop the page order in the sidebar.
• Wireframe and Sitemap views – view your content in a basic wireframe format or view a Sitemap of the pages you’ve created.
• Export – you can export to html/css or to Wordpress format. This is a huge time-saver if you’re setting up a bunch of content pages.

What makes Jumpchart worth taking a look? In my experience clients often have trouble visualizing a website during the design and planning phase. If you’re able to start building the content early in the process, it makes it easier to engage the client in the planning of their website. I’ve also found that being able to look at the content for the site often helps during the design phase as well. Plus with the ability to export to html/css or Wordpress, you can easily transition the work you’ve done during planning to the build phase. Check out Jumpchart at jumpchart.com.