Project management tools for freelance web developers and designers, cannot be underestimated in terms of the value they can bring and the benefits of saving time, hassle and can vastly improve organisation and structure to projects.
There are various tools and SaaS platforms to choose from on the market today, but which ones does a web developer choose? I have listed 5 tools that i believe would bring great value to your projects, including ones that have been used during the development of Marky.
#5 Slack
Communication between yourself, your colleagues, and your customers/clients is vital, and having a dedicated channel for this to happen, can make it seamless. As we have discussed in the previous post, visual and verbal communication can really help projects such as web development, and having a channel to overcome the challenges of long email chains can fast-track projects. This is why we have picked out Slack as our first project management tool. This offers a dedicated communication channel that can feature groups, private inboxes and also integrations with other apps.
#4 Trello
Organisation is key during project management. If you’re developing a website, having a to-do list comes a long way in helping set your daily tasks, as well as your long term goals for a project. Organising these daily tasks and to-do lists can be a challenge in itself, structured in a way that gives clear visibility over what you need to do, as well as being easy to access and tick off after you have completed each task. This is why Trello is such a useful tool - it enables you to organise and prioritise tasks, to do lists and different projects. The Trello Board will feature a series of lists, with cards, where you can add descriptions, picture, links, animations and various other features.
#3 Toggl
Another challenge when it comes to project management, particularly for freelance developers - is managing and organising your time so you can meet your deadlines and complete your projects with us much detail, precision, in a timely manner. Toggle will help you plan and track how much time you spend on your different tasks, whilst also producing reports and summaries on your work.
#2 Marky
As discussed in the previous post, visual feedback in a project can be equally as important as verbal feedback - and it is important to have a structured, easy and visible channel to be able to allow this, especially for web developers and designers. That’s why we have developed Marky, it is a visual annotation tool dedicated to web development feedback, saving time, hassle and long email chains, and to essentially improve communication and feedback between developers and their clients. This tool overlays onto your web development page/project, and your users will be able to directly add annotations, comments and to do lists so projects can be completed faster and more accurate to feedback.
#1 Github
Git hub is the go to platform for every developer. It’s an open source version control system - which enables developers to make constant changes to their project I.e their code and to keep these modifications and updates in a repository. This enables for easy collaboration, and ability to keep track of their projects and changes they make. This is useful in the context of web development because it allows developers to organise code changes to be rolled out to production in a controlled manner.
Often, with medium to large scale websites, developers will use a local, staging and production environments so code can be tested before it is rolled into production. Using git branches with GitHub makes this process very simple by simple git merge operations.
This process also has the added benefit of being able to easily diagnose and find the root cause of a bug if something occurs in production site.
