Even running a fairly small website involves a lot of management. Staff members and trustees need to plan the website, communicate back and forth with the web designer, collaborate to create content, set tasks and deadlines and allocate work to volunteers. At every stage documentation can end up duplicated, spread across several peoples’ computers and is never to hand when you need it.
To make managing your website easier, consider using an online project management tool like Basecamp. What can it do?
Share documents with colleagues and your web designer
Basecamp has a Files section where you can upload all the documents relevant to your website. These might include:
- Draft and final project briefs;
- Invitations to tender;
- Quotes from web designers;
- Contracts;
- Draft images of the visual design;
- JPEGS and GIFS: your logo, photos, backgrounds etc;
- The text content for various pages on the site.
What if you have a lot of documents? Won’t that get confusing? Not really, because you can create your own categories (content, images, invoices etc) and choose to see only relevant files.
Leave comments and give opinions
You could upload your new logo design and send your colleages a message to ask them to look at it and leave their comments.
Make To-Do lists
These I use a lot, sometimes hundreds of items for a single project. Again, they can be categorised, and ticked off one by one as they are completed. You can associate your to-do lists with milestones which you set to help you keep the work on track and on time. You can make to-do lists for yourself or allocate work to someone else.
Collaborate with your colleagues to write content
Basecamp offers whiteboards which you can use to collaboratively write a web page, a contract or a project brief. Create a new whiteboard for your home page and start typing in text; then send a message to your colleagues inviting them to make amendments. Every time someone makes changes to the whiteboard it’s saved as a new version: you can then compare the various versions until you’re happy with the result.
Use email or a project management tool, or both?
The email correspondence that takes place between various parties can build up fast and it becomes difficult to find the attachment you need! But I’ve found the solution is to almost completely stop using email and correspond by leaving messages in Basecamp instead.
When you upload a file or leave a message in Basecamp you can choose to send an email notification to as many other users as you want. Plus, you can subscribe by RSS feed to get notifications of new comments, files and messages as they happen.
Other project management tools
Microsoft Project is the best-know project management software and you might already have it on your computer. I don’t like it one bit, I find it confusing because there are too many features – it’s not simple enough for me or for my clients!
There’s an excellent article on the TechSoup website called Six Views of Project-Management Software.
No related posts.
