Some project managers and organisations advocate the use of a project web site to control project communications and to centralize the most important documents, files and other project assets.

This technique is strongly advocated in David Siegel's book "Secrets of Successful Web Sites : Project Management on the World Wide Web". It is also gaining popularity for running projects where the team members are globally distributed and differing time zones make web-based asynchronous communication ideal. Large projects can be centred around an electronic project management office - otherwise known as a password protected web site.

There are some dangers with having such a site: if you don’t keep it up to date or if some team members don’t use it then it quickly becomes useless; it can cost a lot of time and money to set up which a client is unlikely to pay for; if it malfunctions or doesn’t look good then this can easily give a client a bad initial impression of the quality of your work and its upkeep distracts from other development work; it can give rise to security concerns as confidential documents are accessible on a web server.

That said, if you are co-ordinating a virtual team that is not physically together, possibly spread across different countries as mentioned above, then it can be a very useful tool.

To get round the issue of how the site looks or how much time it costs to set up, I would suggest using one of the very advanced free services available on the web such as www.egroups.com where all the necessary functionality is available and the design is standardized. This site was created, and is still to some degree managed, through a private egroups.com site.