How do people manage their website design projects?

Until now I've used a notebook and pencil.
Planning is ok - lots of spider diagrams, sketches and notes.
But when I start a site, there are tons of little tasks and bugs that crop up that I have to jot down and go back to. Sometimes I have to jump from one part of the site and start on working on something else, and when I come back I forget exactly where I was and what I was doing.

I started recording these tasks in outlook, which is ok, but it isn't really robust enough.

I was looking at project management software, but it seems to be overly complex, and not very conducive to workflow.

Yesterday I tried a heap of mind mapping programs.
The best one for mapping was XMind but task management was poor.
The best one for task management was MindGenius3, but mapping was poor.

What do you guys and girls use for planning and tracking the hundreds of tasks, bugs, jobs, fixes that it takes to finish a site?

Cheers.

I tend to use the Dreamweaver notes feature for tracking debugging tasks and I've never been organised enough to have a nicely setout "road map" for projects, you can guarantee that it would be disrupted by clients in any case.

Personally I write everything in modules and classes (Yep even the VBScript ASP) and each module is tested and debugged before getting "plugged in" to the project. So there is never more then a small section to do.

I finally found what I was looking for.
This program is superb: http://www.conceptdraw.com/en/purchase/
ConceptDraw 'MINDMAP for Projects' 239€

The quality and execution of this is far beyond all the other software I tried.

Cheers.

wow

that program must really be good if you managed to test out a project management software in less than a day and bound yourself to it for 200+.

5+++ will buy from again!!!1


and I agree with Chris - the clients will disrupt the flow so I tend to manage on a milestone basis only.

lol... I've got the 30 day trial, but I'm nearly certain I will be buying it.
It was *exactly* what I was looking for in terms of planning.
And you can feel the quality all the way through it, compared to the others.

As for my enthusiasm after just one day, well, they're easy programs to use. I've got about 80% into the details after 8 hours of playing around, bearing in mind that I'd also just spent a lot of time messing around with similar programs. The learning curve really appears after that, when dealing with resource management and interpreting the reports/charts, which I don't really even need to do.

> and I agree with Chris - the clients will disrupt the flow so I tend to manage on
> a milestone basis only.

Definitely. This isn't really for their benefit though. It's purely to try to digitise my own note-taking and 'to-do' lists. When the original plan is revised, it will be easier for me to insert the deviation and carry on from there.

BTW, I'm not an affiliate or anything, although if I was going to pimp software for a percentage, this would definitely be on my list.

ah ok - I thought you were one of these pop up posters that post in third perspective mode but I read your other posts so my bad !

Admittedly, I have never really thought about trying out a project management software. I'm still trying to master the art of accounting as a self employed designer.

Might give it a shot one of these days! Thanks for the heads up

I thought you were one of these pop up posters that post in third perspective mode

Just call them "shills", it's much easier

> I'm still trying to master the art of accounting

Ah.. what are you using? Any suggestions?
I'll need to move beyond excel at some point!

Shills - reminds me of a creature from LOTR - sounds about right!


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as for accounting software - I have used a few but have finally settled with clearbooks.co.uk - There is a free trial so I would just recommend that you give it a try. I've been using this since November and I'm completely comfortable with it now.

Cheers