We just completed the design and launch of a new website for CGS Asset Management at www.cgsam.com. Check out some more details about the launch here.

As a follow up to my previous post on web project management, after trying those tools out for a decent trial period, I still hadn't really been able to find something that was simple enough for my clients to be able to work with reliably, or powerful enough to do exactly what I needed it to do.

Lately, I have been doing a trial run of activecollab, which is derivative of Basecamp. I have been pretty happy with it's simplicity/power balance, and for the most part was pretty impressed with it. Some of the best features that I like about it:

• Mostly Ajax interface is a pleasure to work with.
• Connecting to it via my iPhone automatically uses a very solid and familiar interface that has been optimized heavily for that platform.
•  Open source PHP/MySQL that can be customized as needed

Awesome interview with Trent Reznor by Kevin Rose at Digg. It is lengthy, but he goes into some great detail on the state of the music industry, and shows that his new models are based on a true understanding of how it all works, unlike most of his peers who have their head in the sand about what the consumer wants.

At least once a year I try to take a good hard look at the day to day operations of the company to see if there are any areas that I could trim the fat, or streamline. This means checking out new tools, or analyzing what processes are taking up the most of my time and if there is a way that I can modify those to work a bit smarter. Not coincidentally, this analysis usually runs around tax time.

This year, aside from the new website and transparent approach to the business, I also wanted to take a look at if I was managing my projects in an effective way. I determined pretty quickly that I am bad for giving myself the impression that I can manage my projects entirely through my iPhone calendar and my brain. Obviously, this is not viable, even for a small business. 

So, over the next few weeks I will be evaluating (or re-evaluating)  some project management tools, with specific focus on:

• Basecamp - this is the de facto standard for web project management. Note that this does not mean that it is the best, it just means that it is the most widely used. It is also the most expensive.
• Teamwork Project Manager - this is a relatively new web-based project management tool that is similar to basecamp. I am not totally familiar with their product yet, but there is a decent ajax interface that I like.
• phpcollab - this is an open source web based project manager. The benefit to this is that I can host it myself, and can make changes to the system as needed. The problem is that I will probably have to make changes to the system as needed. 

There are also a ton of other options, but I think that I have settled on one of these three. I will follow up on some pros and cons later once I have had a chance to play around. I am already quite familiar with Basecamp, and so it is really a matter of seeing if one of the other two are viable.

While I do think that Joomla is probably the best open source CMS out there, it is not without some serious drawbacks. I won't go into them much now (cough multiple access levels... cough), but one area that I think is pretty mediocre is in how they handle using multiple templates, or subtemplates.

When I was looking for a way to have the floating lightbox blog entries that are found on the home page, the challenge that I had was in forcing the popups to not open the main site template in the popup window, which Joomla forces by default, but rather give me a separate window that I could style with different rules.