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

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. 

It has definitely been a process, but the new site is now live. This is something that I have had on my list for quite some time, but only recently have been able to actually roll up my sleeves and get to it.

I decided some time ago that the previous iterations of the site had gotten away from me a bit, and the message was about a million miles away from where it should be. I suppose that I should have figured this out a while ago, after the 10th friend or family member asked me "What do you do exactly?" - go figure.

A large part of the reason for the new site is because of how difficult it was to add  to the portfolio on the old site. The new portfolio is pretty slick, so you should check it out when you can. It's still missing the nice SEO links, but that should be coming soon.

Of course, there is still the old issue of whether or not it is a good idea to print your whole client list on your website. I really do want to go for the whole transparency thing as much as I can, but there is also a question of the wisdom of publishing your active client list to the internet for the whole world to see. For now, I have settled on publishing completed projects - but we'll see.