I gave a lightning talk on the weekend at the WordPress Perth Meetup group – basically a quick show n tell of Trello, which I’ve recently started using for project management.  I’m loving Trello so far, and would definitely recommend it as a light weight, minimalist project management tool for freelancers and web agencies.

What’s Trello?

It’s a web app, where you make a bunch of lists. You can use it on your own, or collaborate with a team. You can label stuff, colour code stuff, add people, have attachments, mark due dates, keep comment threads, make checklists and move your tasks around. They explain it really well over on trello.com.

Take a look at how I’ve arranged my Trello board

As you can see I’ve used Lists for the main stages of production.

Each project is a Card, so I can drag the cards between lists as the project moves through production. This lets me see really quickly where projects are at. Handy.

On the back of each Card I’ve got a checklist for a further break down of project tasks. The team (if there is one) can also collaborate there with comments, attachments, deadlines, labels etc. You wanna see that too right?

Trello for Web Designers / Developers / Agencies

If you’ve been in the web industry a while you will have used all sorts of project management systems. I’ve used everything from an Excel spreadsheet to massively complex CRM/Billing/Support/PM all-in-one systems.  For the freelancer or small studio team I feel like so many of the systems are overkill. They try to do everything under the sun, and make your life miserable doing it. The thing I’m loving most about Trello is the simplicity. If you’re a freelancer, designer, developer or web agency check it out. Using Trello I spend less of my day managing my project management system, leaving more time for production.

More Complex Projects

As a little extra, I’ll also show you the Trello board Jeremy & I  are using for collaborative development on Orpheus – our popular sheet music reader app for Android.  In this case we’re using Trello as a bug and feature tracker for development. The project has it’s own board, and then each bug or feature get’s it’s own card. As you can see below, we use lists closer to the ToDo, Doing, Done standard – tweaked for our workflow.  Just another example of how Trello can be used.