Website Project & Knowledge Management Tools We Love

Editors note: Updated 1/4/2021

One key component of a good team is to have processes in place and useful tools at their fingertips to keep themselves, each other, and their projects organized. Here’s a shortlist of our favorite website project management tools that we use often to keep our projects smooth-sailing from the kick-off meeting to launch and beyond.

Useful Website Project & Knowledge Management Tools

Slack

As a remote team, we need to be connected to each other to stay on top of our projects. We can’t function without this app!

• Easily organize your conversations in Slack “channels”. Channels can now also be drag-and-drop organized in sections by customizing your sidebar.
• Channels are basically little chat rooms you can organize based on each project, topic, team, or whatever you want!
• If you don’t want the channel public, you also have the option to go private.
• You can send a direct message to any person if you don’t want to keep things within the channel.
• Quickly make calls or video chat with your teammates directly within Slack.
• Drag, drop and share files. These are also searchable later (as is all of your content).
• All of this can be taken with you wherever you go via their mobile app, which is also super easy and convenient to use.
• There are also some really fun new features too, like adding a status paired with a little emoji. Takes us back to our AIM days…
• Did we mention emojis? There are so many, and it’s wonderous.
• Integrations are really what makes Slack work well with all of our other tools. We can connect with everything via Slack Apps. If there isn’t a direct integration, Zapier works well too.

Google Drive

For a lot of internal collaboration and some client collaboration, we use Google Drive.

• We use Drive to create collaborative documents that we share with our team members and clients.
• Drive is also useful to share collaborative task lists between yourself and a client to make sure both parties stay on task. Sometimes going back to something more simple, such as a shared excel file (Gsheet), is just easier to work with.
• Some main benefits of using this tool include availability for many file types (documents, spreadsheets, presentations, photos, etc), ease of corporate communication (avoid overloading email servers by not attaching large, uncollaborative documents), the opportunity of sharing any information almost instantly and being able to see/make changes in real-time, and the low cost.
• One thing to note here is that you don’t necessarily need a Google account (@gmail.com) to view other people’s documents, but they will need to physically add you to them with set permissions. If you want to create your own network of shared documents, then you will definitely need a Google account set up. This also helps organize other documents you may be working on outside of your own company, by being able to “save to Drive” and easily find the document later.
• More features include the ability to take the files with you via mobile or tablet and desktop apps.

Workast

We also use Workast, a Slack project management tool, to foster a team-first environment. From assigning tasks to team members to personal to-do’s and reminders, we get a lot out of Workast.

Check out our exclusive interview with Workast on Medium.

Kipwise

Last year we started really honing in on tracking our own processes and making sure it was all documented for easy access when we needed it. Kipwise has helped our team build a stronger knowledge base of information from client-facing FAQs to more technical troubleshooting docs.

Markup Hero

Whether you’re a project manager, customer support rep. salesperson or just about any other role, you’re going to want a screenshot and file annotation app in your toolbox. Tools like Markup Hero will give you a productivity bump from day one by enabling you to capture ideas and share them with colleagues, clients, and partners in an instant.

• This tool is great because it works universally with everything else you’re already using. Want to send a markup in Slack, just paste the link. Need to add an annotation to a Google Doc, just paste it. Need to screenshot an email, just snap it.
• The screenshot tool works as a desktop app on Windows, Mac, and Linux, or just install the handy Chrome extension. Then snap anything on your computer, enter a website URL or upload images and PDFs.
• We use it to explain ideas without having to write a lot of text. Add arrows, callouts, text, highlights, boxes, and tons of other annotations with ease. Use blur, crop, insert an image, and other editing tools to make your image perfect
• Use the instant share link to send your markup to anyone via email, Slack, SMS, or any other communication tool; or just copy your file and paste it into anything else your working in.
• It’s also great for quickly annotating PDFs, Google Docs/Sheets/Slides.
• And Markup Hero organizes everything in a history section. You can even add tags to quickly find snaps and annotations. But best of all, you can edit your past annotations — no more flattened files that you have to re-create over and over.

Bonus tools!!

• Pixelied.com – great for quick creation of a blog, advertising, and marketing graphics (alternative to Photoshop)
• Frase.io – great for building blog post outlines, researching keywords and content
• Notion.so – notes on steroids!
• Grammarly.com  – the industry-standard tool to review and edit content, blog posts, etc.
• ClickUp.com – great all-around project management tool

Key Takeaways

1. You can easily use this list for your own website project management process, to keep yourself and your team organized, so you can have more time for more fun.
2. You can use this list to determine whether your web designer or developer is organized enough to keep your project afloat and make your business a success.