Today we are quietly launching the international version of Floorplanner.com after a 7 month beta period of the Dutch version. In these past months over 30.000 Dutch users have created an account and together they have created almost 100.000 floorplans. Based on their feedback we have finetuned our Floorplanner and steadily worked on the international version that will officially be launched in the coming weeks.

Altough we did our best to iron out all little bugs and inconsistencies there is allways the possibility that we missed some things. Let us know if you find a bug or a wrong translation so we can fix them before the official launch. We will reward the most active bughunters with a free PLUS account.

When we quietly released the international version of Floorplanner.com last friday (the 13th) we didn’t expect it to be picked up that soon but within 1 hour there was a growing stream of visitors creating accounts and floorplans

At one moment we even made it to the Del.icio.us hotlist and got good reviews on a number of weblogs which attracted new visitors especially from Russia and the US.

Our team has been monitoring traffic and created floorplans and allready we done an minor update in order to fix some small bugs. We will add other improvements later this week.

Thank you all for using Floorplanner.com. We are looking forward to your comments and suggestions…..

We are constantly refining the Floorplanner and although not all updates will be mentioned on this weblog, yesterday we’ve done a more extensive update fixing little bugs that you have reported and adding some improved functionality that you have been requesting. Below you can find the most important changes

Saving a design using the same name
One of the most requested things was a better way to save a design without giving it a new name. From now on you can overwrite your current design with a new one by using the small “save” icon next to your design’s name.

Highlighted doors and windows
When placing a door or window you will see that the item is highlighted. This will make it easier to select an element instead of a wall.

Improved readability of dimensions
We have added a white outline to all dimensions making them better readable against a dark flooring type

“New design” button fixed
Some of you noticed that the “new design” functionality was not functioning properly since one of our recent updates. You were all right and it should be fixed now. Thanks for noticing…

If you find a bug or have suggestions, please let us know. Your feedback is appreciated.

It is always very interesting for us to see what kind of floorplans you are creating with our tool. Do you also want to see what other people are making ? Then take a look at Floorplanner.com/fresh Here you can find the last saved designs in public available floorplanners and can even vote for your favorites.

Get inspired by browsing through all public designs. In the near future we will add extra sorting options so you can quickly find and save the highest rated designs. If you want to include your Floorplanners in the Fresh page then make sure you have set the publish setting of your floorplanner to public. You can also add a short description and some tags to make it easier for other users to find your plans.

This week we did some minor improvements in the Floorplanner drawing tool in response to some feedback.

Three separate view settings
In the navigation menu you now have the choice to toggle some view settings on or off separately. Text info, Grid, or Dimensions. Furthermore, a different approach is used for the display of measurements; for each wall separately a dimension is shown instead of dimensioning along the side. In this way a more precise dimensioning is possible. (See picture below)

Wall Thickness
Drawing functionality is improved as well. If you split a wall, the thickness is maintained for both walls. And when new walls are created from a “node” when you move a wall, the new walls inherit the thickness of the moving wall. With this improvement you will have to reset the wall thickness less often. (See below)

If you have any suggestions for improvement, please let us know.

Through our stats we regularly find weblogs or websites that talk about Floorplanner. Here a few quotes from 3 reviews that we found last week:

Junction Blog : This is an extremely interactive versatile product that makes creating professional looking floor plans easy.I recommend setting up a free personal account, I cannot wait to see how this product develops over the next few years. I predict It’s going to be a big hit.

Move.com : You can either do a replica of your home and change it a little bit, or you can go all-out and add as much fun stuff as your want. All you have to do is create a free account and in no time you can start creating you dream home.

Killerstartups : This is an extremely useful tool for real estate professionals.

We will be present at the upcoming The Next Web conference at June 1 in Amsterdam. The Next Web is a one day conference with a focus on the near future of the web and how new technology, business models, innovation and culture-changes affect the direction of the web and the way we do business.

Looks like this will be a interesting conference as they have some great speakers lined up and an mix of new European companies and services. If you are also planning on being there and would like know more about Floorplanner please drop us a note and we’ll see you the first of June.

Tech Journal has a nice review of Floorplanner.com. Check it out, it’s a fun read!

Introducing FloorPlanner, a web-based layouting program that’s as easy to use as PowerPoint and as accurate as AutoCAD (to a certain extent). It’s a Flash-based program that allows users to draw using preset images of the usual things to make a house, office, or any structure that will eventually house people.

All in all for anyone who wants to make their own floor plans or room layouts, FloorPlanner is a great free service that can take the place of much more expensive softwares.

Just before the weekend we did quite a big update on Floorplanner.com with a lots of small and bigger changes. Below we will highlight the most important ones:

Paid subscriptions - Floorplanner PLUS and PRO subscriptions are now available. A PLUS account is $ 29,- per year and allows you to create 5 projects with multiple floors and no limitation on the number of designs and PRO accounts start from $ 24,- per month . PRO accounts have a 30-day FREE trial. For more information see our Pricing page

Try-it page - For people who would like to see what you can do with Floorplanner but don’t want to create a Free account we have added a Try-it page. On this page you can play around with a small design . You can add rooms, move walls and change the floor textures or furniture elements. The only limitation is that you cannot save this design, for that you still need to create an account.

Solved bugs - We fixed some bugs in drawing mode that should lead to a better auto generation of the rooms and floors.

Look and feel - Every page on Floorplanner.com now has an unified navigation menu that links to the Try-it, Weblog, Pricing and Fresh pages and we also did some adjustments on the look and feel of our Homepage and Weblog.

And last but not least :

Chinese version - Our Floorplanner is now also available in the Chinese language. Yanni, the newest addition to our team, has done a wonderful job in translating the Floorplanner website and application. She also suggested a number of typical Chinese furniture and household items to be added to our libraries and is maintaining our Chinese Floorplanner weblog.

A number of people have noted that they have problems viewing a floor plan with Internet Explorer 6. This problem has been introduced by a recent update and we are working to fix this as soon as possible. Thank you all for noticing…

UPDATE 22-05 : The problem should be fixed now