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Feature

Step away from your spreadsheet, get a visual bug tracker

December 19

A favorite of every project manager, one list to track everything ... with extra tabs to track other stuff. Spreadsheets are great for many things but they are not ideal for tracking website bugs and change requests. They become an unruly mess of lists and tabs, hidden columns and half complete rows. Keeping all the information up to date becomes a full time job and eventually something falls through the cracks. Relying on spreadsheets to manage all that information is an open invitation to a communication breakdown. At some point information will not be updated, data will get out of sync and people will stop using the spreadsheet because it becomes too difficult to keep track of everything, exactly what it was supposed to fix.

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Case Study

Case Study - Conversion First Marketing

November 29

This is the first in a series of case studies showing how different companies are using PageProofer to improve their services, make work easier for their internal teams and keep their customers happy. How does a local SEO expert uses PageProofer to stay ahead of the competition? We asked Tyler at Conversion First Marketing a few questions about how his team is using PageProofer.

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Feature

Three tips for better bug tracking

November 14

I recently stumbled across an old blog post by Joel Spolsky titled "Painless Bug Tracking". Even though the article was written in 2000 (eons ago in the internet age) it has a lot of valuable content for today's web developers with regards to bug tracking. For those who don't know Joel (of Trello fame) he has been in the software business for a long time. Joel's team at Fog Creek developed Fogbuz, one of the earliest bug tracking systems I can remember.

What can web developers (and entire web teams: designers, QA, content) learn from a blog post written in 2000 ... a lot.

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Feature

If your client feedback looks like this, it might be time for a change.

November 7

For a web designer or developer the most treacherous part of a project often starts just after the first client review. That's when the feedback starts to come in. Sometimes it comes like a gentle trickle, sometimes it comes like a raging river, but it always comes in. Having a good feedback system in place can be the difference between keeping a client and team happy or having a project go completely off the rails with communication breakdowns.

Over the past fifteen years in web development I have seen everything when it comes to clients and teams managing feedback during web projects. I have actually had printed copies of webpages with red marker highlights dropped on my desk. In an effort to give and get feedback as quickly as possible many teams resort to rudimentary, manual processes that quickly breakdown and frustrate everyone on the project. Thankfully there is a good solution available (spoiler alert PageProofer), but let's look at a few examples of the bad feedback I have seen and what you should try to avoid.

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Feature

Finding the right issue tracking software for your web development team

November 19

For as long as there have been computer developers there have been bugs (the first recorded one actually was a bug) and the necessity to track them. Thankfully when tracking computer bug we no longer need to jot notes in dusty lab journals.

Depending on the type of development and the sophistication required, software developers have a wide variety of bug and issue tracking options to select from. Most web developers (and creative teams) have a slightly different set of needs that many bug and issue tracking systems are not well suited for. In order to help find the best solution for your team here are the four (five if you're lazy) categories that bug and issue tracking solutions fall into. No one solution is perfect, each has pros and cons, but some are better suited for web development and web design teams.

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Feature

Visual feedback - smarter issue tracking with PageProofer

April 18

Tracking client feedback, issues and bugs during website development can suck the life out of a project and a team. Every great web designer and developer knows that at some point they need to get feedback from teammates and clients during website development. The problem is twofold. First, team members who don't like the extra effort required to give good, detailed information about issues that occur on a website. Second, the unorganized ways that feedback is sent: emails, spreadsheets, attachments and text messages. Valuable time is wasted trying to determine what issues have been assigned or fixed instead of actually fixing the issues.

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