Pixelita Designs

Tell us more about you, your company and what do you do?

Pixelita Designs is a small, Houston, Texas-based web design shop specializing in small business and professional web sites using WordPress, CMS Made Simple, Expression Engine, and TextPattern. We also offer graphic arts services; document production services; forum design, maintenance and management services; web hosting; and copywriting and proofreading services. Pixelita’s principals, Joni Mueller and Ivan Mini?, are members of the HTML Writers Guild and the Graphic Artists Guild, respectively.

How did you find out about activeCollab? What were your first impressions?

I first began using activeCollab when it was an open source project, around 2007. I had become very frustrated with my previous project management system, and my web design partner Ivan Mini?, suggested that I give aC a try. I am glad I did. I found aC to be intuitive, lightweight and perfect for my needs at that time. More importantly, it has grown to meet even more of my needs today than it did when I first began using it.

How were you managing projects before activeCollab? Email, pen and paper, another project management tool?

I was using PHPCollab, an open source project management system, to manage all my web design projects and, quite honestly, it was overkill for most of them. I found it to be extremely difficult and cumbersome to use, and so did my clients. It seemed to be a chore to set up projects and an even bigger chore to actually manage them there. I found myself bogged down in the administrative aspects of it, and wasting more time there than on any projects the system was attempting to manage. The final nail in the coffin is the fact that development of the next version of PHPCollab appears to have stalled out, with the new version being promised for nearly a year now.

How did activeCollab help you improve your team's collaboration? What are the tools you use the most? If you were asked to pick one "killer feature" which one would it be?

aC has a very intuitive interface and the process for adding and configuring projects is flexible and easy to implement. You can reuse templates from previous projects, further streamlining the process. I work much more efficiently with aC than I did with my previous project management system. I probably don't use time tracking as much as other folks do since we don't generally bill by the hour, but for those projects where we do, it's very handy to have. I have implemented Public Submit on our web design site and have encouraged our clients and prospective clients to use it. I love having everything online, in one place, right at my fingertips.

What do coworkers think? How have they adjusted to activeCollab?

Our clients have embraced aC enthusiastically. One client even remarked to me that he gets a twinge of excitement when he sees a notification from the aC system because this usually means there's something for him to review! My web design partner, who is our graphic artist, doesn't use aC as often as I do, but he does use it when interacting with clients about the design process. One of the beauties of aC is that you can choose how much information you want to receive. And our clients like it for that reason as well. Some clients are actually teams of people, each with the need for a different level of involvement and aC handles this elegantly. But the best feature of aC, as far as we are concerned, is the Incoming Mail feature. My clients have a tendency to hit "Reply" and respond directly to us via the email notifications that aC sends out. Having to flip flop back and forth between email and the aC project area is a big distraction for me. This cures that and simplifies my life tremendously.

Thank you for your time! Anything you have to add?

One thing I’d like to see in a future release is improved handling of tags. I mentioned in a post on the aC forum that tags could be a very powerful feature if they were implemented more solidly. Further to the issue of tags is the fact that there should be a list of previously used tags. This would aid users in making sure that duplicate or nearly duplicate tags aren’t created and would bring a higher level of consistency to the use of tags.