Intereactive Web Design - Sugar Land, TX

We’ve always used Basecamp as a way to organize our thoughts and todo’s on our client work… and it’s always worked very well for us. But when it comes to brainstorming and sharing large amounts of ideas (the shotgun approach), I’ve always thought that basecamp struggles for reason’s I’ll detail later. We’ve tried several solutions including building something ourselves and nothing has worked well.

Our Needs

First off, lets look at our needs to document things as a company. Over the past year we’ve been building a web ap and in doing so we’re basically building our own PHP framework. This is also the first time I’ve work shared a major project with someone, so we needed a place to explain different helper functions and documenting various classes that we all use. We also like to have brainstorming sessions where we put down any and all ideas about a project or pieces of a project. Once we have it all down we need to organize it in a readable way.

What Didn’t Work

Like I mentioned earlier, we started trying to use Basecamp, specifically the Writeboards, to write down this large amount of information. In my opinion, the Writeboards are just underpowered for this task. They really don’t handle text formatting, spacing, indenting, quoting very well and when you’re trying to convey thoughts to your team…it really makes it tough. Plus having to remind myself all the time what formatting does what. I understand Basecamp is a minimalist approach… I just don’t think that this is the area where that approach works well.

Next up we moved over to Backpack, which definitely worked better as far as laying out ideas the way you can embed notes, lists, etc. But again the formatting and spacing issues left us having to re-explain what we meant at each meeting, not to mention having to pay a decent fee to be able to have multiple users. So, several hours of copy & pasting later I had migrated everything over to Google Docs. This solution was great because we had already converted our company to Google Apps making collaboration a breeze. The spacing and formatting became a non-issue by using Google’s rock solid HTML editor. I would guess we used Google Docs for about 6 months with minimal complaints and our only issues with Docs revolved around the fact that they doesn’t order your files very user friendly. It’s either by name or date and with a whole company full of documents, filtering on one projects data is hard. They do have folders which made it manageable but still was very cumbersome.

The New Solution

Recently, I was having an issue finding something within Google Docs and got frustrated so began looking for a new solution. I realized that Google had released Google Sites recently so I gave it a look not expecting much, but I was really pleasantly surprised! It’s very basic as far as “sites” go… it’s by no means a drag and drop build your own website kind of thing, but it really lets you put down some information and sort it the way you want. You basically start by creating a “site” and from there you add pages filled with your content. You can add pages to the main navigation sidebar and order them how you want, which is the nicest thing about it. When you create a page, you will be asked to choose a basic template for a Web Page, Dashboard, Announcements, File Cabinet, or List. And then further inside each page you can embed video, photos, lists, feeds… just about anything. It also has the nice HTML editor (with an HTML code mode) that Google Docs uses so you also get the benefits of using the awesome formatting and layout tools that Google provides.

All in all it’s an excellent solution. Just create a new Site for each project and because it connects right into Google Apps everyone is already a collaborator. If you don’t use Google Apps then just add the collaborators that you want for that project and start adding pages in with all the content you need. It’s very easy, fast and straight forward… everything we need in a collaboration tool.