Reality is that most web development agencies are not aware of the full power of web today, letalone clients themselves
For a while now I have been testing out a tool called Gantt Project for the purposes of simple and quick project management. It works well!
So far my issue with most Project management tools I have used so far has been that they tend to be fairly complex to use, learn and get used to, while overall offering some advanced features which tend not to be used in most every day circumstances in small and medium companies.
A simple tool, which handles tasks and resources would be good and if it is free (so every employee in the company could use it without worrying about licences) then that it is a bonus as well.
Enter Gantt Project, a Java-based project management tool, which handles all of the above really well and does not have a bloated interface or a bloated application for that matter (unlike tools like Adobe Reader for example, which in recent years have been loaded with various unnecessary and unrelated feature no one ever uses).
Gantt Project handles Gantt charts (hence the name) and also offers a nice resource chart, which shows the resource load on each of the resources you have assigned to your project.
With the Gantt chart you have some basic options on whether to display allocated resources directly on the chart, so it is easy to overview who is responsible for what, or whether you want to keep it simple and let it simply show the tasks and their associated dates.
In the view option on the top menu bar, you also have an option to display the PERT chart for your project, which is a nice alternative way to represent your project plan. This charting option is very nice looking and fairly powerful, as you can re-arrange your rounded boxes around the screen as you like.
In your task planning screen (the main screen for most project managers) you can indent tasks (making them into subtasks of another task, which is crucial for most projects and organisation of clusters of logically associated tasks) and you can also associate tasks with one another.
One of the best features of this software is that it is able to output project files in various formats (PDF, PNG, XML, Microsoft Project file, CSV, HTML, etc.). PDF output is done in a very descent manner, while HTML output, I must admit, could be done in a much more standards compliant manner, which should not be too hard to implement, since it is a matter of tweaking the XSLT transform file only.
You could be able to publish the file on an FTP server, so that other people can access the file with Gantt Project tool collaboratively, which is a potentially very powerful feature of the software, but I am unsure how viable it is work-flow wise.
Overall, Gantt Project has been a very positive surprise to my project management tools arsenal, and I am definitely keeping this one for the longer term at least until something better comes along.
6:15 PM 
