While I don’t generally do more than one freelance project at a time, that doesn’t mean that I don’t need a little help keeping on top of things.

I’m working a small freelance site for a sales rep that is due to launch this month. This time around, I believe that I have discovered the holy trinity of project management: Blinksale, Basecamp, and Harvest.

Your mileage may vary, but I believe this solution is perfect.

Blinksale

I signed up for Blinksale the day it launched because I’m a firewheel fanboy and Josh is a local.

Prior to Blinksale I was using PayPal for everything. While it does ok for invoicing, I got tired of them taking my money. Even though I can still use PayPal with blinksale, I reverted to back to accepting old fashioned checks.

Blinksale is dead simple, not to mention sexy. My only wishlist is that they add auto-increment invoice numbers. I hate making up a number every time.

Basecamp

Wow, how did I manage before Basecamp?

Basecamp is not a replacement for real interaction with your client, nor is it a crutch for having a poor project scope.

However, it is a marvelous tool for clearly keeping your clients informed of the project’s status and what is expected from them. It allows me to do collaborative design with my client. We work together on page copy using writeboards, they review my mockups using messages, and we all get things done with milestones and task.

Harvest

Harvest was the missing link. I had the invoicing and the project management, but I was still recording my time with excel spreadsheets.

The harvest widget is the icing on the cake. It only takes a click to stop and start recording and switch tasks.

Putting it all together

Basecamp really the hub of the entire workflow. Both Blinksale and Harvest support the Basecamp API making it easy to import projects.

1. I set up a new project/client in Basecamp
2. Enter tasks
3. Import project/client into Harvest
4. Perform tasks and record time with Harvest
5. Import project/client into Blinksale
6. Invoice
7. $$$$

We finally took down the splash screen for Sabreux.com yesterday after almost three months of development.

Why did it take three months? Well, that’s because we are very busy with other projects around Sabre.

Site Features
The site is powered by the latest and greatest version of Wordpress MU. We chose this flavor so we could easily launch and maintain other blogs (like our Agent Blog). All of the pages on the site are wordpress pages which allows me to maintain them without opening up an FTP client.

This was my first time using WordPress and I’m pleased to say that I had no problems. I’m a fan. In fact I’m thinking of giving up the fight with TextPattern and making the switch. (Off topic: why is it so hard to get clean url’s to work with txp and media temple?). I love the WP syntax and being able to mix in PHP.

I also use several plug-ins from the WP community, but the two handiest are Get Custom Field Values and wp-cache.

I use Get Custom Field Values to retrieve the key and value set uniquely for each page. By making the template aware of which page was being displayed I could do lots of dynamic things at the page template level, such as highlight the active menu item and dynamically include things. This saved me from created unique templates for simple page difference.

Keeping Things Private
Because we are in-house to Sabre, we have to keep some things private. To get around this I setup an internal webserver behind the Sabre firewall (actually it’s in the GDS datacenter in Tulsa). The idea was that private content would be here and we could control access without setting up usernames and passwords.

I toyed with ideas for replicating the two sites but decided against it. Instead, sabreux.com would have all public content and the internal webserver would have private content only. The internal website links back to the public site.

Because sabreux.com will be the primary entry point, we made the decision to post links to private content, even if the user wasn’t inside Sabre. This mean that I needed a way to notify and transition users to the private site. I also wanted it to be automatic so contributers didn’t have to do anything special to link to private content.

The solution was to intercept private links and tell the reader that the content they requested was private and on an internal server.

My friend Steve wrote an extremely useful script called private.js that looks at all of the links on the page. If an href matches the url of the internal webserver, it rewrites it to the redirect page and applies a class and title attribute. I can visually indicate that the link is private content. From here the redirect page passes the reader on the the internal server.

My next step will be to cookie the user when the visit the internal website. Once they see the redirect, they don’t need to see it again.

We also reversed private.js to also indicate links from the private site back to public sabreux.com. Neato!

I just finished coding up a nifty WordPress template for our new “Agent Blog” for sabreux.com. I’m very pleased with how it turned out. It feels very corporate, but definitely not as rigid looking as Sabre’s other branding.

Wondering what other designers are up to? Do your part and fill out the http://alistapart.com/articles/webdesignsurvey Design Survey.

At this year’s SXSW, Jason and Rob led a great panel on finding and maintaining inspiration in everyday life.

Citing Kevin Cornell, they suggested becoming a design vigilante - “If you love design, take it back!”

This idea really resonated with me. I’ve always believed that design should be used for good in everyday life. And the best way to stay inspired and keep learning is practice. Find a design problem and solve it.

I’ve got a few blog posts in the queue of some quick before & after websites that I made over for the sheer fun of it. After realizing the power of this exercise, I ran home and bought designvigilante.com!

I must admit, I’m very shocked this was available. Look for something soon.