Project Management Tool for Web Design Firms

My web design firm has been using the project management tool Basecamp for a few years now, and I’m not sure a better tool could be created, at least not for our needs. We primarily use it for centralizing communications, as a file repository, and for storing contact information. It has many other features such as time tracking, milestones, to-do lists, and such but we’ve found these to be only minimally useful for us.

What I like best about Basecamp is 37signals unique approach to development of the tool, which is basically “We’re building this for ourselves, and if you like it, great, if you don’t, tell us what we can do to improve and if we like your idea we’ll build it in, and if we don’t and you don’t like us because we don’t do everything you want us to then take off, you hoser.”

More than once I’ve been using Basecamp and thought “Man, it would be nice if they added such and such feature” and within a week I got an email from them announcing the very feature I had been thinking about. There are improvements to the system on almost a weekly basis, and they’re substantial improvements, not just fluff. Like increasing the amount of file storage to five times what it was before, or making it so that you can upload files with 1/3 the clicks, or making it so that you can just reply to emails and have your response added to the system rather than having to login to post a response to a message (I’ve been wanting that one for a while).

So if you run a web design firm, or a graphic design firm, or an ad agency, or an SEO firm, and you track everything on spreadsheets, or in Outlook, or don’t do any tracking at all and your company is a complete mess, I’d highly recommend you check out Basecamp. I’m positive it helps my firm get at least three times the work done that we could do otherwise, and it helps us get that work done better than we ever could without it.