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Harvest is an online time tracking and billing application. Seeing as I am looking at these things all the time, and am very picky, I thought I’d write a short review. More of a “shout out,” really.
Harvest Time Tracking Page
Harvest is designed on the keep-it-simple model: Have just the features you need, when you need them, and nothing else. It is designed for independent professionals, or teams, and is priced very reasonably.
For a single user—an independent consultant, say—it’s only $12 a month. You can add 2 additional users for $10 each per month (let’s say you wanted to have a couple of subcontractors helping you out.)
For a team of up to 5, it’s $40 a month.
Designing an application that is both simple, and does what you want it to, is no small task. Ask anyone who’s tried to design good software: It’s a lot easier to make something that you throw the kitchen sink into, than it is to make something that has just the functions you want, and nothing else. And yet, that is what makes an application the easiest to use. No extraneous details.
Harvest lets you track the time you have spent on any number of clients and projects. It lets you set project budgets by time, or money. This is one of my favorite features—because what this lets you do, is see how much time you have used up on a project, in a little visual readout, like so:
Visual Project Readout
In the example above, I am over my project budget by over 3 and a half hours. Not good! But I love to be able to see this sort of thing, at a glance.
What is also wonderful about Harvest, is that it does invoicing. Its invoicing features are excellent: Simple, and natural. Just click a few buttons, and it sends out a very atrractive invoice. It will send an email to the client, help you keep track of who’s paid and who hasn’t, and also tell you which invoices are overdue.
It also does recurring invoicing—either automatically sending out a new invoice, or reminding you about it, so that you can send it out yourself.
Again, it does all this very intuitively and naturally, in my opinion—without a lot of extraneous bells and whistles, but doing everything you’d actually need it to do. And again, this is not an easy job!
Major kudos to Harvest for making a great app. In the past month and a half since I switched to it, I am just loving using it.
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I’m all about the fast process, and I’m pretty impatient. Therefore, I love things like the TwitterFox addon for FireFox (get it here).
From 12seconds.tv
It’s always in my browser, so whenever I see something I’d like to share, all I have to do is click on its little icon at the bottom of the page, and type my comment. Then, click the “link” button, and it inserts a link the page I’m on.
And, it’ll turn the link into a short URL if it needs to, for space.
Very fast, and that’s the only way I like it!
Note: For those not as familiar with irony, this series of posts is intented to use humor to illustrate important points about getting a website that works for them, and the potential pitfalls along the way. —ed.
One thing you figure out pretty early on in the web biz: You don’t really have to know how to code web pages all that well.
All those people who talk about web standards, CSS layout, and building sites for efficient updating, blah blah blah—that’s not stuff that’s going to get you a hundred dollars today, and it’s not stuff you should worry about. Your mechanic doesn’t tell you what’s going on under the hood, and your small business client’s not going to ask you what’s going on underneath the hood of their website either.
Believe me: The vast majority of small biz clients who want a website, just want it now, and the last thing they want you to worry about is learning about “best practices,” “usability”, stuff like that. Just get in, get out, and get on to your next website. Duh!
What I’m trying to say here, is, most small businesses know next to nothing about what it really takes to build a good website—one that will last over time, give them what they truly need, and match their real business objectives.
And that’s where you come in: Since they know so little, your not knowing a lot, or keeping up with standards in the industry, that’s really not that big a deal.
Sure, over time, the next web designer that works on your code might be a little frustrated because you laid the entire site out using tables (the web wunderkind of design for 1999).
Sure, it might take them three times as long to make a change to your HTML. But what I’m saying here, is: Your client is never going to figure this out, so you may as well do it the old fashioned way, and save all that precious learning time, which you could more profitably spend… churning out some more websites!
Sure, outputting your client’s 20-page site as a series of static HTML files might not seem very efficient to the effete “web professional” who has to make a tiny change in all 20 of those files later on. I can just see the poor sap whining to the client—“but the reason this is taking so long is because the code wasn’t architected well.” (They love using big words like “architected!”) Wah, wah, wah.
Meanwhile, you’ll be on to someone else’s site, and they’ll be toiling away. What’s it to them, anyway? They can just charge the client more to make the changes, because it’ll take so much longer! It’s a win win for everybody! Well… almost everybody! 
*
Last year, my wife and I had a contractor come out to our house and add an extra room. He seemed like a nice guy, and since I know nothing about building stuff, I just pretty much trusted him. He worked and worked, and said, “that’ll be $xx,xxx.00″. Fine, and we paid him. I found him through a friend of a friend of my wife’s uncle, and we went with him because he offered us the cheapest price by far!
And what’s wrong with that!?
I am wondering what the strange smell coming from our new room is, and if you look at it from a certain angle, I bet you’ll notice that it doesn’t quite “line up” with the rest of the house.
But … so what?
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“When I was in college, I made a promise to myself that I was never going to do work I didn’t love, even if it meant I had to go hungry.”
–Garrisson Keillor
You have to try to build software, and install software, and use a lot of software, before you start to appreciate just how much goes into good design.
For a few years, I have been helping clients set up online shopping carts. I’ve looked at OS Commerce, Zen Cart, WP Ecommerce, and dozens and dozens of other ones. Zen Cart was okay, compared to some.
But CS Cart is much better than anything else I have seen. The new 2.0 version is one of the nicest pieces of software I have worked with.
Out of the box, the front-end is really beautiful. It is clean and functional, with lots of white space.
This is contrary to most other default shopping cart templates, which look very boxy, clunky, and cumbersome. It’s a modern, practical layout choice: fixed-with centered, and CSS-based, with an active width of 962px. They have obviously thought about this a lot.
Also, there is a lot of Ajax, to make the interface feel easy to use and fast.
The color palette is versatile, modern, and very pleasing. Even out of the box, this is a cart that people would actually want to buy from. This is a really nice feature–maybe you’re a small business that doesn’t want to spend the money right now on a custom design. It’s a very nice thing that, out of the box, CS Cart would give you something you can work with, and add to later, as more resources become available.
CS Cart front end, out of the box
Drilling down to the product display level, the interface continues to be friendly, appealing and extremely usable.
Product Detail
It works like you’d expect it to, and want it to. (But not like it does in a lot of older, “Web 1.0″ carts!).
Click on any of the smaller photos, and they instantly replace the main image–rather than opening up some other window, or making some tired new HTTP request.
Click View Larger Image, and a light box appears (without lots of boring wait), over the page, displaying the larger image. And, that lightbox has thumbnails for all the smaller images, and if you click on these, they–again, seemlessly–replace the other image. I have to say, this implementation of a light box display is actually nicer than a lot of light boxes in fancy websites I have seen.
The other tabs, such as Features and Reviews, pop up instantly, via DHTML, rather than making you wait.
Back-end interface
The back-end control panel for CS Cart is gorgeous as well. It is neatly divided into large, easy-to-read sections with bold, easy-to-read tabs. As I have found throughout the design of CS Cart, a designer has really been at work here.
Clicking on any of the large tabs–Orders, Catalog, Users, etc.–instantly brings up a list of sub-links, that clearly spell out the various sub-areas.
Again, the actual panel areas themselves are clearly marked, simple, and easy to read. While a graphic designer has clearly been at work, a user interface designer has also clearly been at work. And, taken the time to get things right. (Simplicity is harder to get right!)
I consider it a major, major benefit, that the cart I help my client set up is very easy to use. They’ll have to use it, and I really want them to feel confident and comfortable. This cart gives me lots of confidence about that.
While the back-end is very beautifully designed, and has a feeling of simplicity, CS Cart also has really all the features I have been able to think of, that a cart should have. Once again, to be able to design an interface that has all the features you’d need, but also is simple and easy to use, is no small feat! It’s accomplished by lots of careful thinking about where things should go, how they should work, and how they should work with all the other things.
Some of the features that stood out to me, as might-not-haves, that CS Cart does have, include:
The list goes on.
On the coding end, CS Cart is beautifully designed and modularized PHP. The design elements are neatly broken up to make design modifications easier. The layout is fully CSS-based. There is even a Customization Mode that allows you to view the site with the ability to make template changes inline, from the site.
There is a lot to say here–a whole series of posts, really. But suffice to say, they have really thought this through, as well. And, e-commerce is complicated. To get it all right is a lot of work. To see how much attention and time has gone into this one makes me happy.
I’ve set up CS Cart for a few clients, and their Helpdesk ticketing system works really nicely. I’ve logged several support tickets, from the obvious, to the very complicated. In each case, they’ve responded quickly, and, hontestly–they really knew what they were talking about! They’ve been polite, heplful, and smart. They went right in and fixed what was wrong, and in every case, it was something I just hadn’t quite figured out, and not a problem with their code.
Summing it up, I really wanted to write a long post about CS Cart, because I appreciate how much care has been put into this software. It is one of the nicest-designed web apps I have seen, and, as I said, e-commerce is not easy! I want to see them do well!
You can find CS Cart software at http://www.cs-cart.com.
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-10-11
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