Since then, web-based project management services and software have exploded and there are hundreds of thousands of options available. The “right” PM software for your business is no longer an easy or obvious choice. In fact, I would make the argument that there no longer is a “right” choice.

Here at SiteGoals we’ve tried many different options as a group, and each of us independently has tried at least a handful of other options. That’s why I can tell you from a place of authority that there really is no single, perfect solution for everyone. What works for you may not work for another person and what works for your entire agency definitely won’t work for every other agency. I think part of the problem is that project management is simply too broad of a subject.

Project management involves keeping track of due dates, milestones, tasks, employees, clients, communication, etc. The list goes on. Instead of trying to recommend a single solution, let me break down the list of tools we use at SiteGoals to solve each aspect of project management.

Scheduling (Milestones, Dates, Deadlines)

We used to use Google docs for this, we’ve tried Basecamp, but we are currently using Paymo. I’ve talked about the greatness of Paymo in the past, so I’ll be brief here. Paymo is primarily a time tracking tool, but in order to track your time you have to have projects and tasks. Paymo has all that, but it also lets you add clients, milestones, due dates, and much, much more.

We’re transitioning to agile for some of our projects, so for that we’ve been using Pivotal Tracker. I wrote a short comparison between it and Paymo, Basecamp, and Paymo which sums up my thoughts and how we’re using it to develop Evenflow.

Tasks

We use Paymo for all of our projects, but I’ve also used LazyMeter for my personal tasks. It is such an awesome tool I’ve started using it for work items as well. Basically I give myself a larger, overarching task in Paymo to attach time to, then I use LazyMeter to break it into smaller tasks that I can check off throughout the day.

Client Review

We have our own software for interacting with clients that we’ve used for years. We use it to post wireframes and comps for the clients to comment and approve. We’re currently working on integrating it with Paymo to reduce our time spent entering the data.

Bug Tracking

For more development intense projects, we’ve used Fogbugz, Mantis, and sadly even Google docs in the past. Paymo doesn’t have a system for client users and our manager above doesn’t have a bug tracking system. So we’re still trying to find the perfect solution here. Leave a comment if you have any suggestions!

URLs, Logins, and Passwords

If you manage more than one client, you know how difficult it can be to keep track of all the different login credentials you’ll need. For just one website there can be a unique URL, username, and password for: the host control panel (cPanel), FTP, the CMS admin, just to start with. Throw in a couple years and another 30 clients and your list of passwords can be hard to manage.

That’s where Passpack comes in. We use it at SiteGoals to securely store our passwords and share them between developers. I wrote a lengthy review on my personal blog.

Our Web of Software

It has become a bit of a tangled, overlapping web of software that helps run our business. But it works, partly because it’s just what we’ve decided to stick with and partly because there’s quality software involved. But ultimately we’re working on a more custom solution that will be targeted towards web design and development agencies that function just like ours.

The software is called Evenflow and our first release is the Proposal Generator. We are currently using it to build our own proposals and it has helped save time and make our estimates more accurate. We’re planning to release it in 2012.

Have you heard about the Xtreme Profit Robot?

I can’t believe I haven’t heard about this.

I am going to cut to the chase. I found some great software for making money online and I just want to share it with you.

Wow, thanks “Dalila Spall” for not wasting my time.

This artcile keeps it real, no doubt.

Priority number one at SiteGoals: Keeping it real.

Synthroid is a thyroid hormone finishing disturb worn to take visible people,
whose the thyroid gland produces adequacy hormones.

Yes. Yes it is.

If you think these are entertaining, try a 100 more in this article at Cracked.com.

Before you start throwing down cash on shiny new rims and a fresh paint job, consider a few performance upgrades first. With the help of a few savvy developers, you can speed up the load time of your website, increase search engine optimization, remove security threats, and make it faster and easier for future updates (like that coveted a redesign). I’ll show you three proven methods to boost your website performance without moving a pixel.

1. Upgrade Your Software

If your website is built on a particular framework like Ruby on Rails or our personal favorite, CodeIgniter for PHP; or if you have a  Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress or ExpressionEngine, chances are your software is already out of date. I consider these software packages to be the engine of your website and just like car engines, they become outdated and get replaced by better, faster versions. Obviously software updates move at an even faster rate.

Major milestone versions (e.g. 3.1 to 3.2) usually contain new features and can be released anywhere from once a year to once a month, depending on the software. With website development lasting anywhere from several weeks to several months, your CMS may be out of date before your website even launches! Good developers will keep you as up to date as they can, but there may be custom developed features that make the upgrade process somewhat less than automatic. No matter how painful (or expensive) that process is though, it is important for several reasons.

Security

The more minor updates usually contain security fixes and can be released as often as once a week. If the security issue isn’t already widely known, it certainly will be once the patch notes are released. Hackers will target outdated versions by exploiting the known security holes. Keep your software up to date to eliminate that risk.

Performance

While poorly developed software can get bogged down with feature bloat (I’m looking at you WinAmp), the software that runs your website should be listing speed as a feature. As long as that’s the case, performance will improve, especially when jumping whole versions (e.g. 3 to 4). If you don’t update, you’ll never see those speed improvements and your website will likely get slower as images, videos, and widgets build up.

Support

Typically the first suggestion you’ll get when complaining about a bug, is to update to the newest version. The longer you go without updating, the harder it will be to find relevant support of the particular version you’re using. Unless you pay for legacy support, you might not get any official support until you upgrade.

2. Refactor Your Code

Not all code is created equal. Whether it was poorly written in the first place, or suffers from problems due to multiple authors, code can quickly become a jumbled mess. This so called spaghetti code can slow down performance, cause unpredictable errors, and make every bit of maintenance a real pain the in the ass.

All is not lost. You may not need to toss everything and rebuild from scratch. Instead, you should refactor your code. Refactoring is a term commonly used by programmers, which means to modify or rewrite a bit of code to improve it somehow, without changing what it actually does. This can mean making it easier to read, easier to maintain, or better performing.

If your pages take too long to even start loading (between clicks), you may want to refactor some of your server-side code. If parts of your website load slowly or it feels sluggish in all but the newest browsers, you may want to refactor your front-end code. Advancements in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript have made previously file-size heavy features, light and quick to respond.

Even if you’re limited by a particular technology, like the CMS, experienced developers can always find wiggle room. At SiteGoals, our team of professional developers can diagnose, recommend, and enact solutions to improve performance across a variety of platforms and software.

3. Organize Your Files

Once you’ve finished updating your software and refactoring your code, you’ll likely have a bunch of extraneous files floating around on your FTP server. While those won’t affect performance for the visitors of your website, they will slow down anyone forced to wade through them.

Just because you’re not linking to a file, doesn’t mean it can’t still be accessed. Changing the name of a file (e.g. “index” to “index_old”) doesn’t remove it from the web. The robots that Google, etc. use to collect search engine results, will find everything on your website unless you explicitly tell them to ignore it. If there’s duplicate content in those old files, your search engine ranking could take a hit. Even worse, a real person could find old and incorrect information.

In addition, those outdated files can pose security risks. Hackers will use scripts similar to Google’s robots that crawl the web looking for files that can be easily exploited. They don’t discriminate and will find your old files, if you leave them on the server.

Figure out what you aren’t using any more, back it up, and then delete it from your live server. You’ll have a nice clean file structure to navigate through, making your developers happy and productive. Another open window gets closed on those annoying hackers.

Rebuild, Revitalize, Renew

Whether you’re hiring a web developer to revamp your website or doing the work yourself, I hope I’ve given you a good idea of what to cover.

However, we now have a text file of our own, aptly named humans.txt. This secret message, for human eyes only, is

an initiative for knowing the people behind a website. It’s a TXT file that contains information about the different people who have contributed to building the website.

It can often be a fight of egos and willpower, to try to put your logo, or even just your name on a client’s website. Not to mention that an agency name, like SiteGoals, doesn’t exactly give credit to the actual people and all the work that went into building a website. The humans.txt file aims to correct that, “in an external, fast, easy and accessible way”. Pretty cool. Take that robots!

How do you format it?

To help push the standard, you should create a text file called humans.txt (all lower-case), and make it UTF-8 encoded. Unfortunately, there is no language that we could encrypt or code it with that the robots couldn’t decipher, so it is in plain text only. This also means that anything you include in there can technically be read by humans and evil robots alike, including spam scrapers looking for contact information. So it’s probably best to leave your email address out if you’re worried about that kind of thing.

You should also place a reference to the file in the header, like so:

<link rel="author" href="humans.txt" />

For more tips and suggestions, take a look at the official website. They provide an actual template to use, along with a lot more useful information.

Go humans!

As of today, there are essentially only three options: Electric Function’s Membrr (with OpenGateway), Invanto’s EESuite (formerly EEMember), and EllisLab’s own Simple Commerce Module. We used Membrr for RISE and we highly recommend it, but it’s not without negatives. EESuite may be a potential new contender, and Simple Commerce is a… ahem, “simple” solution, but it only works with PayPal.

As always in the web development landscape, there are many different systems “in development” or even “beta testing”, but that doesn’t really help when you’re starting a client project next week.

Shopping Carts with Subscription Options

The first step of signing up for a paid membership subscription is essentially a shopping cart checkout process. So you would think that any number of shopping carts for ExpressionEngine would support this feature. Unfortunately there are only a couple shopping carts for EE 2.0+ and none of them offer subscription functionality, yet.

CartThrob

CartThrob is a sleek looking shopping cart for EE that we’ve looked at every time we need an eCommerce solution. However it wasn’t until recently that they released the EE2 compatible version. Unfortunately, the recurring donation feature of the original didn’t make the transition. In fact, there’s not even a feature like that “in the works”, according to one of the CartThrob developers. They do offer to build a custom solution per project, for a flat fee of $600. This might be an option if you must have CartThrob, but I personally would prefer a module that was built from the ground up for subscriptions.

FoxEE

FoxEE is another highly touted option for an integrated ExpressionEngine shopping cart, but unfortunately they have yet to release their EE2 version. Their 1.6 version does offer “subscription tracking with automatic renewal and free trial periods”. They’ve actually switched to a new name for EE2, calling it ACME CART, which is currently in beta testing. Whether it will offer subscription billing on release, or even when that release is, remains to be seen.

BrilliantRetail

BrilliantRetail is a relative newcomer to the EE eCommerce market, which means it was built for EE2 and it does look very solid. They offer many different product types, including physical and downloadable. They are apparently working on a subscription product type that could work perfectly for a paid membership website, but unfortunately it’s “not ready yet” and may be on hold for the foreseeable future.

Subscription Focused Modules

There are a number of different ways to search for this functionality: “paid membership”, “subscription”, “recurring payment”. No matter which way you phrase it however, there are only a few legitimate results on devot:ee, but a lot of results on the EE forums for people looking for a solution.

EESuite

EESuite is an evolution of older plugin, EEMember, by a company called Invanto. The description for the module makes some pretty lofty promises:

Just install the EESuite module and start selling premium digital goods or member subscriptions from your website. Charge monthly, quarterly or yearly fee from your subscribers for access to your premium content. Sell not only the subscriptions, but also the digital products. Easy product configuration settings.

If you’re even a little skeptical, like I was, take a look at the functioning demo! It really does seems like a very good solution, which may be perfect for your particular situation. The price is currently set at $89, pretty good for the amount of features you get. Do your homework before dropping cash on this though, because I’ve heard they do not offer refunds. This rumor, combined with their lackluster documentation has kept me away from trying it so far.

The Official Simple Commerce Module

ExpressionEngine comes bundled with the Simple Commerce Module, which is a pretty complete shopping cart that includes recurring subscription payments. There is of course, a catch. It only supports PayPal. So if you need Authorize.Net, Google Checkout, or anything besides PayPal, you’re out of luck. This simply isn’t an option for many of our clients, as they often already have accounts with other payment gateways, or need to give their customers multiple choices.

As designers we generally don’t like PayPal because we like to keep users within the same website and the same interface throughout the entire transaction process. Support for gateways that offer API access, like Authorize.net, is something we always look for in a payment plugin or module.

My Recommendation

At this point, you may be thinking that EESuite is your only option. Having only one option sucks, especially when it’s limited to depending on an outside developer, something that often happens with EE2. Fortunately for paid memberships, there is an alternative, and a pretty good one at that.

Membrr, with OpenGateway

After looking at all of the above options, I’ve decided to stick with Membrr to accomplish this functionality on all future client sites that use ExpressionEngine. It may not be perfect, but it accomplishes the task, offers a lot of very useful features, is easy to use, and has extensive documentation.

For $145 you get Membrr, which serves as the interface between EE’s own member module and OpenGateway, a multi-gateway payment platform that allows you to quickly create different subscription plans with various options.

Support from Electric Function has been very responsive and helpful. The support form is also fairly active and I’m usually able to find an answer within a few hours from either of those sources.

It has lots of features, including the ability to interface with a number of different gateways, not just PayPal. You can setup automatic emails that get sent when users create, cancel, or change their subscription in anyway. With the template tags you can allow users to do all of those actions from within your own templates, allowing for a completely custom interface.

Conclusion

I hope that by the end of the year, there will be many more options for an “off the shelf” subscription billing system for ExpressionEngine 2.0, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. For us, Membrr is the preferred solution and will remain so for the near future.

Are there any other options that I’m missing? Has anyone rolled their own custom solution? Let me know what you think in the comments!

Once you have your map you just need to manipulate it using CSS. Use position: absolute and z-index to put it below the rest of your content. Someone else has just posted a short tutorial on how to do it yourself. You can view the example he posted, as well as a couple others.

All you need to start coding in HTML5 is “<!doctype html>”. Yep, it is that simple. John Resig, author of several JavaScript books and member of the Mozilla team, wrote three whole years ago about using HTML5:

What’s nice about this new DOCTYPE, especially, is that all current browsers (IE, FF, Opera, Safari) will look at it and switch the content into standards mode – even though they don’t implement HTML5. This means that you could start writing your web pages using HTML5 today and have them last for a very, very, long time.

That forward compatibility is reason #1 to start using HTML5 today. For browsers that do support all the fancy new tags and features, we can use tools like Modernizr to detect and enable them. Leo Burnet recently published an article that sums it up better than I can:

Because HTML5 is a collection of features and technologies, as developers we can pick and choose to use portions of it that we know are already supported by devices and web browsers. Or we can leverage JavaScript libraries like Modernizr or Selectivizr to add support or provide control for older web browsers.

These collections of scripts and tags allow us to do things like the HTML5 <video> and image slide-show on LifeSize.com. It also makes our code much easier to read and understand with tags like <header> and <footer>. We’ll continue to use HTML5 wherever possible and hopefully so will everyone else!

Enjoy the Final Weekend of SXSW Powered by

Live from 6th Street in Austin, TX!

We need to be able to do time estimates on projects, then track our time to compare against those estimates. Paymo allows us to do just that. There are lots of other time trackers out there, but what sealed the deal for us on Paymo, was that we could import our information directly from Basecamp. This allowed us to instantly switch systems without interrupting our workflow.

Paymo is so simple and easy to use that there is almost no learning curve. It looks like Basecamp, which makes us happy, but it does so much more! After just a week of using Paymo, we canceled our subscription to Basecamp and added enough users for all of our staff.

The ability to track time on both Mac and PC has been extremely useful considering we have an even mix of both in our office. We now have a centralized system for all of our staff and all of our projects.

Being developers, we’re also very excited about the API. We’ve already started using it to display our full estimated budget of work ahead of us. We’re using that information to help us schedule upcoming projects and tasks.

Paymo is already a boon to our efficiency and we haven’t even starting using any of the reporting or invoicing features of the system. The more we use it, the more improved our business is, and hopefully the happier our clients become!

Although we all love browser-based email clients like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Hotmail, they actually add another frustrating level of software combination’s to test. Not only do you have to make sure that your design works in Gmail, now you have to make sure it works correctly in Gmail in Firefox, in Gmail on IE8, etc. Now go back and do the same tests for Yahoo in all the various browsers.

Probably the two biggest things to remember when creating HTML email templates are:

1. use tables (floats, positions, etc. won’t work)
2. don’t use background images (they aren’t supported)

Here’s a few articles to help get your started:

• How To Code HTML Emails (by MailChimp)
• Guide to CSS suport in email clients (by Campaign Monitor)
• The Automatic CSS Inliner Tool (this tool allows you to develop with your styles in the head and then convert to inline, but make sure to do all testing after converting)