If you’re someone who manages a lot of Basecamp accounts and has a hard time remembering passwords, this post is for you.

There are a lot of authentication systems emerging, Facebook, Twitter, and Google all allow apps to let users login using their credentials.  Open ID is an open authentication system that a variety of providers operate.  It’s a godsend if you “can’t remember your passwords? tired of filling out registration forms?”

I have a lot (12, precisely) of Basecamp accounts.  We run it for Flatsourcing, and I’m pulled into a lot of client’s accounts.  I used to have to remember the URL, username, & password for each one.  That’s 36 things to remember, and countless combination of things.

Now I just remember a single URL and password with OpenID.  It’s awesome.

Here’s what you need to do:

• Create an Open ID.  I use myOpenID.  There are a lot of providers.
• Log into Basecamp and click “my info” in the upper right.
• In the area for your username & password, click “Use OpenID” and enter yours
• When you land on the login screen, click “Login using an OpenID instead” and enter yours
• You’ll be taken to your Open ID provider to enter your password and then voilà, you’re in
• HUGE BONUS - Basecamp has an “Open Bar” that is a drop down of all your Basecamp accounts (actually all your 37 Signal product accounts).  These are all now connected and easy to switch back and forth between.  This feature alone makes switching to OpenID for authentication well worth it.  That and you have 36 memory slots freed up.

Enjoy!

If you’re reading this, you’re already seeing the fruits of a design & content refresh that we’ve been working on for the last couple months.  It’s be a fun project, and we still have some polishing to do, but by the end of this week things should be looking really good.

One thing that is interesting is how challenging it can be at times to work on your own site when you do client work. I think its almost a cliche among web design & development firms that they never have a chance to work on their own sites.  However, its important to keep up appearances, and we hope this new site polish does exactly that.  I think Alex (our chief designer) did a great job, and I am sure we’ll hear from him about some of the decisions he made from a design standpoint.

From a content perspective, Peter and I had extensive conversations about what we though we should communicate, and how, and I wanted to share a few of those:

• less is more - people don’t read on the web anymore (why am I even bothering with this post ?!?) - so we really shot for concise, clear copy. we also removed anything extraneous, particularly on the homepage. we’re trying to focus people to the content that says what we do and why you should work with us
• playful - Nothing makes my eyes glaze over like copy that is such corporate-speak that you don’t get any of the personality of the company.  We made attempts to be playful (particularly with our headings) but also professional. How do you think it worked?
• what we do, what we don’t do - one decision we made was trying to let the site act as a filter, in hopes that people would self select on the lead process and the site would deliver better qualified leads.  The fact is that Flatsourcing doesn’t work for everyone.  We work for technical clients, generally startups & development shops who have a strong project manager or lead developer to manage our teams.
• try before you buy - one thing that we are packaging a little more is the test task that we always ask prospective clients to have us complete.  The best way to gauge our skills and experience what its like to work with us is to do just that.  And so we’ve packaged it up a little better and are encouraging people to give us a try.

How does it all come across?  I’d be very interested in your thoughts on the new site.  Please provide any feedback you’ve got in the comments below. Thanks.

We’re often asked why we focus on retainer based contracts and have to field some concerns about what a client can expect to get for their money. Simply put, a full-time developer is not just a full-time developer. Rather a full-time developer is a fully supported team to help you see through your projects.

A client team consists of a few people, and while we have likely been retained for development work, there is often much more that goes into it. Below is a list of the types of skill sets a client can potentially have access to with Flatsourcing.

• Production Designer – Otherwise known as a front-end developer, this person focuses on the getting the artwork into a usable interface
• RoR Developer - The most commonly requested resources in the Flatsourcing family. This is a person who architects and builds your product. While not all developers are equally experienced, we often blend skill sets on a team to ensure that all clients receive the highest quality of work.
• Art Designer – This person focuses on the user interface that will comprise your software. Whether designing a UI from scratch or working with an outside designer, the Art Designer provides another level of flexibility to your team.
• Client Manager – This person is your contact on all projects. All of our Client Managers have technical backgrounds and exceptionally strong English skills. Depending on the client, the Client Manger is often the primary contact on your contract.
• Project Manager – This is a person that can assist you to realize your project’s goals by allocating daily tasks, structuring your specifications, and determining delivery processes. Often this role is filled by a Client Manager, but when necessary a dedicated PM can be added to a team.
• Business Analyst – If you’re considering a business that relies on web applications, this person can help you navigate the internet business environment. The Business Analyst also initiates monthly calls with each client to get a bigger picture of business goals and provide updates on improvements to how Flatsourcing can help you achieve these goals.

Of course, not every client has a need for each of these resources, but by building a team of complimentary skill sets for each client, we can improve the chances for success across the board.

To find out more about how we can help you, get in touch with us now.

We decided to start process of training our designers to create nice and fancy design mock-ups. Since our guys are working mostly on creating and fixing XHTML, we kind of  lost the pulse of art-design and need to catch up.

I assumed that the most efficient way of training would be to copy and re-creating somebody’s designs. We will be re-drawing some of nice popular web-sites to learn the technics, styles, colors, software tools and other stuff.

Internal plan of such training course looked like this:

• 1-st week: 2-3 hours a day - copying already existing design of working and popular web-site. It’s prohibited to take any graphics, everything should be re-drawn from scratch.
• 2-nd week: 2-3 hours a day - changing PSD we’ve created on the 1-st week of training (having in mind that we’re creating design for the real estate company, for example). Designers need to choose:
  • New color scheme (prepared two color schemes for designers to choose from)
  • New logo (can be just a place-keeper)
  • New textures and backgrounds
  • New graphics (can be photo)
  • New menu - changing it to be tab-styled, for example

Here are the details that I will be paying attention to while checking the results:

After the first week of course:

• Similarity with the original design
• Colors
• Textures, main grid
• Choice of fonts
• Shadows
• Overall quality

After the second week of course:

• Quality of choosing new colors
• Ability to built a new logo in the design
• Choice of new textures
• Skills of creating or choosing suitable graphics
• Choice of new menu solution and quality of it’s preparing

As a result each designer has to prepare two mock-ups:

1. copy of original design
2. changed mock-up for the abstract real-estate company

Of course this training plan got a lowest priority among other projects, however I hope we will have some results in a couple of weeks.