New from The RSG: PunchyTime

We're quietly launching our latest new product, PunchyTime, in beta.

"The heck is PunchyTime," you ask?
It's a simple tool that lets creative agencies track their billable hours for projects. It tracks time, warns you when you're approaching budgets and deadlines, and it gives project managers all kinds of nifty reports, like "who's our best client?" and "average time to complete a project" and "who's slacking off?" and more.

The basic idea is that getting a team of designers, coders, programmers, and copywriters to track their time is like herding cats. Angry cats. PunchyTime makes it easy. When projects are finished, managers can download time reports for invoicing.

We built PunchyTime for ourselves, back in 2002. We had about a dozen web design projects, and about a dozen "routine website maintenance" projects going on at the same time. Everyone tracked time differently: paper, sticky notes, Excel, and PDAs. When it came time to invoice (you know, get paid for all our hard work?) it was such a pain to get all our notes assembled. We looked around at other tools out there, and they were all too bloated. So we just built our own.

We've opened it up for beta testing (so it's totally free). We're thinking in a month or two, we'll have enough feedback to revise and make it live. If your agency needs a little help tracking time, you should give it a try.

Good designers realign

Nice article over at alistapart.com, from a grumpy old web designer (like us). Stop with all the crazy "extreme site makeovers" and just tweak things in practical ways that make business sense.

Includes an excellent case study of how The March of Dimes "realigned" instead of "redesigned." We're actually working on a very similar project right now, for a client who's wanting to realign their home page, but not "reinvent the wheel." Ah, so nice to work for smart clients.

CNN.com redesign

Joshua Porter, from User Interface Engineering, analyzes the redesign of CNN.com from a usability perspective. He mainly talks about their decision to move from a vertical navigation design (where the links can be longer) to a horizontal "top-nav" where all the links have to be as short as possible. Interesting points.

JoeRockHead.com

Our good friend Steve (from code18hosting) just launched his own music store: JoeRockHead.com. We know Steve from waaaaay back when we all worked at the now-defunct mp3radio.com. That was a dot-com that tried to sell MP3s of local bands. Back in the days before iTunes and iPods. When the best mp3 players could hold about 5 songs (the heck were we all thinkin?). Anyways, looks like Steve's going to do it right. How do I know? I just bought a CD for about $10. That's about hmmm....infinite more profit than mp3radio ever made. Cool!

Banner ad space (by the pixel)

Remember the "Million Dollar Homepage" site, where you pay by the pixel to cram your logo onto the page? The guys over at GeekCulture are doing that same sorta thing with banner ad space (look for the chimp in their left rail). Neat idea.

MailChimp Nominated for Webby Award

So we just found out that MailChimp is a nominee for the 10th Annual Webby Award. The category is "Best IT/Hardware/Software Website." Pretty cool, because our little chimp is up against IBM, Dell, Sun Microsystems, and CNet. We're pretty much a shoo-in, right?

In case you didn't already know, the Webbys is sort of an "Online Oscars." The judges include Vinton Cerf (the guy who helped Al Gore invent the Internet) and Matt Groening (the creator of The Simpsons). So yeah, we're pretty excited. Nerds like us don't get this kind of attention very often.

Being a nominee means we're also eligible to win the "People's Voice Award." That's where the general public can place their votes. Kinda like American Idol, but with geeks.

If you'd like to see MailChimp win the Webby (or if you just like irony), vote for us here: