Online collaboration has become easier than ever. There are so much open communication options that it is easy for anybody to network online. Finding the right group is just a matter of few clicks now. Hence, sharing ideas has become easier too. Blogs and online forums have made it very neat to share ideas, connecting to peers and collaborating around various issues.
And that is how collaborative web teams form. It is now easy to connect to talented individuals anywhere in the world. Therefore, if you need people with specific skill set in your team, you can recruit them in your online web team. No matter where the people are located; they can still be a part of your team. Collaborative projects can actually grow very fast; people who participate in such projects are usually highly work driven and motivated. Hence, working with such people is easy and you can come up with satisfactory result.
Many self employed people, independent contractors and freelancers also follow this model. In order to accomplish a bigger project, they collaborate with other professionals. This improves the quality of the project and helps them to complete it on time as well.
Online collaboration has become a trend in web design; a lot of designers connect to others to complete web design projects. Here are some benefits of online collaboration.
Experience Sharing
Whole is always better than the some of all – so goes the saying. As you involve more than one person, the website design project or any other job will be immensely benefited from the experience and knowledge of all the collaborators.
Two or more than two collaborators can bring in huge knowledge to the team; for example, one of them might be proficient with CSS and HTML, on the other hand, another person might be a Photoshop expert. Collectively they can produce excellent output.
Based on their experience they can bid for different types of works too. Someone is expert in logo design, another one is a web design expert on the other hand, the third collaborator is an authority of responsive design. If they collaborate, they can bid for varieties of projects.
While collaborating, if you recruit team members carefully, you can get the full advantage of experience sharing.
Delivering More in Lesser Time
Online collaboration helps you to reduce project delivery time. As multiple professionals work on the project, things move faster. And as you have people with diversified skills in the team, no one needs to spend time to learn what they do not know. Tasks are distributed among the team members according to their skill set; this significantly reduces delivery time.
However, you have to ensure proper task assignment to reduce delivery time. At the same time, you have to make sure that there are people with diversified and unique knowledge in the team. Redundancy should be avoided as much as possible. But as you grow bigger, you might need more than one person with similar skill set in the team to manage the work load.
Combining Varieties of Design Styles
Different web designers follow different styles. By involving multiple designers you eliminate boredom; at the same time, you can ensure that the designs the team is producing are unique and unusual.
Most of the web designers have some kind of affinity towards 1, 2, 3 and 4 column designs. The designer that loves to work on 2 column layout, always create 2 column designs. This makes it monotonous style. You can break this pattern by collaborating with other designers who follow different styles of design.
Learning, Idea Sharing and Energy flow
When 2 or more than 2 members collaborate on something, the energy level is likely to increase within the team. Different people bring in different skill set, toolset, knowledge and ideas on table. This becomes a great opportunity for all the team members to learn new things. And as people keep on sharing their ideas, things keep on improving and the best output is delivered.
Here are some cool collaborative tools that might help you in this job –
ConceptBoard
This is a powerful and highly sophisticated collaborative tool that you need to give a go. The biggest advantage of ConceptBoard is that it can be accessed via different operating systems, browsers and even different devices.
This tool also offers document support. That means, you can draft a file onto a board and then all the members of your team can work together on that file without affecting the workflow at all. And the best part, you would not have to install any software onto your PC to be able to Voice Chat with your team member. Video conferencing facility is available right on your board. And here goes the icing on the cake thing. This tool allows you to walk through your broad.
JsFiddle
This is a life saving tool for all the developers out there who hate procrastination like anything else. With this tool, developers will be able to work simultaneously on a single project without affecting progress of the work in one way or the other.
Asana.com
The purpose of this tool as claimed by the company is to simplify collaboration among group of people and to reduce the necessity of mailing one another for communication purpose. This tool lets you manage and schedule your tasks.
It helps people concentrate on things that they are doing and helping them to reach the deadline well ahead of time. As all the conversation and tasks are clubbed together in one place, you will find less complicated to figure out how the project is making progress and how the people who are involved in the project are doing their job. You can get complete history of the project in a single click.
TeamLab
This tool is a universal solution to all your problems. With this tool, you will be able to manage all your documents, projects and collaborate seamlessly. As the files are stored on the cloud, you would not have to worry about their security.
No longer do you have to switch between programs to be able to perform a task. This tool has got a multi-featured system that enables you to manage every aspect of the project without getting yourself involved in it and wasting much of the productive hours.
