Last week I talked about some of the Project Management systems available for you to keep your web design projects and clients organized and happy. This week, I’m going to focus on a very unpleasant task that most of us avoid at all costs. I’ve been putting it off for nearly a year, but an upcoming email server migration has caused me to have to face and deal with it head-on. Organizing that pesky email inbox.

If you’re like me, you probably made some New Year’s resolutions to get better organized this year. Pixelita Designs is busier than it’s ever been right now and my Christmas present to myself this year was to purchase the Small Biz version of Ilija Studen’s Active Collab, a Basecamp-type project management tool. I tried out ActiveCollab back when it was open source, as a substitute for PHPCollab, the PM tool I’d been using pretty much since I started doing web design for a living. PHPCollab is an awesome PM system with Gantt charts and a pre-populated web design project template with helpful milestone presets, but it’s overkill for most of our web design projects and not nearly as intuitive as AC is. Plus, development seems to have stalled out, with a new version 2.5 being promised for nearly a year now. And my clients found PHPCollab a bit cumbersome to navigate, whereas they all love AC and use it consistently. But to be fair, there are several other PM systems out there, such as old timers BaseCamp and PHPCollab, and some relative newcomers, like 5PM and CollabTRAK, which I’m going to briefly review for you below.

I talk quite a bit about WordPress here, but don’t think that we don’t use other content management systems too. One such is CMS Made Simple. We’ve been using this CMS for over a year now and have developed the following sites with it:

Stonefield Villas Homeowners Association
Idylwood Civic Club
Hastings Law Firm, P.C.
CoreCAPITAL

WordPress Isn’t the Only Game in Town

Our clients have found its backend to be very intuitive and easy to use. We find designing for it to be a breeze. There are many modules available for it that match or exceed anything WordPress offers. And in fact, there’s one thing that CMSMS does well that WordPress does not (yet): Members Only Area (using FEU – Front End Users and Self-Registration modules). We are currently developing a Members Only Area for the Idylwood Civic Club.