Below: Happy Cog founder (and "King of Web Standards") Jeffrey Zeldman discusses how the Cog team uses Basecamp.
What does your company/business do?
Happy Cog creates handsome, accessible websites powered by standards-based code, sophisticated user experience design, and smart content strategy for clients from AIGA to Zappos. We direct and produce An Event Apart, an intensely educational two-day conference for passionate practitioners of standards-based web design. Since 1998, we have published A List Apart, a leading and influential magazine "for people who make websites," and will soon launch A Book Apart, a new series of laser-focused, meticulously edited web design books, beginning with HTML5 For Web Designers by Jeremy Keith.
Why do you need Basecamp
We share projects and personnel across studios in New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Even with great project managers—and we kiss the ground ours walk on!—it's a heap of people and projects to keep track of. Add a few "special" Happy Cog staff designers and developers who work remotely from places like Boston and Raleigh, and Basecamp becomes an absolutely part of our daily workflow and communication. You know the saying, "Photos, or it didn't happen?" Well, that's how we feel about Basecamp. If it's part of the job, from the smallest detail to the fattest comp and heaviest research document, it has to be on Basecamp, or it doesn't count.
How do you use the product and why do you like it
We use Basecamp as a file repository for shared resources, from An Event Apart attendee email boilerplate to every deliverable of every phase of every Happy Cog client job. It's our discussion forum for the editorial and technical review of every article commissioned by or submitted to A List Apart Magazine. Our A List Apart editorial team edits and copyedits every accepted piece in Basecamp's Writeboard tab. We also use Writeboard to edit site and newsletter copy and for cross-studio strategic discussions about the agency, the conference, the book series, and the direction of the magazine. And of course we use Basecamp to keep project dates and deliverables on track.
What did you use before and why did you switch?
Before Basecamp we had just one small studio, in New York. And even running that strained our organizational abilities. (At least, it strained mine.) Basecamp is one of the key tools that allowed us to expand beyond a single studio.
Before Basecamp, client discussion was handled in person and by phone (we still do those things of course) and via email, which has become less and less reliable and usable as Basecamp's capabilities have grown.
And copy editing was done in Word, about which, the less said, the better.
We also sometimes had the unpleasant responsibility to edit content in Acrobat.
As for calendars and project management, we had nothing. The tools were either too hard to use or too hard to share (or both).
Basecamp brings together virtually everything we need to run our business in one central tool that's easy to use and share.
Tell us a story about a situation where Basecamp helped you out.
Once or twice during our years in the business we've had tough disputes where, despite everyone's best efforts and intentions, the client's expectations and the agency's have grown wildly out of sync with each other. Tensions of that sort can quickly spiral out of control. In one circumstance where the client's understanding and ours were in profound disagreement, and where the looming confrontation looked like it might have legal ramifications, we were able to show the client that we had communicated clearly and fairly all along, and that he had (in writing at least) agreed with our understanding at every one of the disputed points.
We were able to reach this understanding because we'd carried on all our client correspondence on Basecamp. Thus there were no email chains to try to dig through, and no opportunities for either side to pretend it hadn't seen an important message. Every single point of discussion had a clickable permalink.
That kind of response doesn't make the client any less ornery—and ultimately we stopped working with this particular client—but it does provide fast and easy verification for your claims, and helps you more quickly transition away from pointless "You said/no I didn't/what I meant was" back-and-forth to get down to more productive discussions about getting back on the same page and agreeing on a way forward.
So Basecamp is a tool of agreement, even in the midst of disagreement. I like that.
