I knew that it would happen some time. It did. I picked up a job that looked pretty simple: take an existing website where “some things just aren’t working right” and fix it. I went a little overboard for the. I didn’t just fix the piece of crap theme they had chosen, I found a fabulous new theme and wrote a new child theme for it. It included a custom background image for the home page and the site pages, a lot of neat custom CSS and used Bootstrap so that the site looked great on both mobile and desktop browsers. I even added an appointment scheduler. And only billed 6 hours for the whole thing! That’s a lot less than the industry average for that much customization of a child theme.
BUT I get ahead of myself. After I had delivered the proof of concept website with just some css color changes to the child theme, I started getting “to do” emails. Well, great, I thought. I already wrote that “tweaks and enhancements will be @ $35/hr” so this was going to grow into much better than a 3 to 5 hour job 🙂 –>to myself.
However, once I had pretty much wrapped up the initial request for the site, I invoiced for the hours. Whoa. The client comes back and – after a bit of back and forth – basically says f-you, I’m not paying for any of this.
I had a bad feeling about the client from the beginning – my wife says “trust your gut” and I should have. The good news is that I only wasted a day of coding and about a day of learning about a new theme, some new CSS customization tricks and what can and can’t be done well with background images in WordPress. So the learning value was solid.
And now, I’ve altered by WordPress Consulting Contract to state specifically that I will bill after every 6 to 8 hours with expectations of being paid before continuing the work. That, I think will be a good way to stop Scope Creep, Creeps!
