Two weeks ago I had the chance to attend FOWD which was awesome and mentioned that I lost out on one of my freelance gigs. That gig was BloggingTips.com
Back in February, I offered Kevin from bloggingtips.com my services to redesign his blog for free. The idea was to get some fresh work into my portfolio, learn how to work under client limitations and objectives, and ultimately to promote my services. Now I could have easily charged him my normal rates ($700+) since I’m not an amateur, but sometimes you do crazy things when your passion driven. Throughout the project’s life span, I made a few mistakes that persuade Kevin to call it quits:
Deadlines:
Everything started out great. Communication was totally there. He gave my design great constructive criticism along with some feedback and ideas, I listened and made changes accordingly. He bounced a few ideas to me, and vice versa. After about 7 or so revisions, we had “the” layout we wanted.
It took me about a good two weeks to finish the mockup from the start date. A day or two later, I had the mockup sliced into xHTML/CSS ready to get converted into WordPress. Originally, I gave him a completion date for a month. I took into account how long the entire theme would take compared to previous work, giving some leeway time for bugs/milestones and days that I go to school/work etc. I forgot one thing, and that was all the events that took place around that time. I wasn’t sure if I could go to any of them so I didn’t add those days in. But I was determined to go to all three of them and since the gig was free, I thought everything was all handy dandy right? Strike one.
Professionalism:
I had everything down pack with my professionalism. I treated him like a paying client or anyone else that I’m doing work for. BUT, when the time came around and I had the chance to attend those events, I didn’t give Kevin an update letting him know that things would take a little longer than expected. The layout still wasn’t converted yet and I over promised several times saying that it’ll be done tonight, or next week. 3-4 weeks into the project I pulled a couple all nighters trying to catch up to get things back on track but something always came up last minute. I shouldn’t have let it go this far. Strike two.
Don’t even treat free gigs like your personal projects:
Ah, another thing I messed up on which probably put the icing on the cake. Its been two weeks after the deadline and I’m coding away, converting everything into WordPress. Things were going perfect despite a few milestones that popped up here and there. One of those I thought I could accomplish but turned into a complete nightmare. It was the last task to do—the section, “browse by author.” This section basically shows a picture of each author along with their name, website, and latest blog post. I figured that would be easy to code, just create a loop for each author and only show 1 post right?
For some reason I couldn’t figure it out and started getting frustrated. Sipping on some kool-aid around 2am on a Saturday night (I think), I was determined to make this section work by trial and error. I tried a million ways trying to make this code pull the latest post by author and broke it down to pieces:
<?php if (have_posts()) : $author = 0; ?> <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); $author ++; ?> Now we're inside the loop, let's find Rob Mead and see if it works. <?php if (the_author() == "Rob Mead" ) : ?> <?php echo "yes!"; else : echo "no"; ?> <?php endif; endwhile; endif; ?>
Using the awesome Theme Test Drive plugin, I was able to test this on the live blog without any readers seeing it. The script failed displaying “no” so I modified the loop again to see if that would work—still displaying “no.”
I started getting mad at the code, tired of seeing the same word “no” every time I uploaded the changes and refreshed the page so I changed the wording to echo "gay"; so I could see something different. Uploaded and refreshed the page and saw “gay” and had a little laugh. It cooled me down and somehow spark a little energy to start from scratch.
BTW: I say the word “gay” sometimes when things are messed up or when something’s not cool or whatever. To Kevin, well he thought otherwise, (which I can understand) and the way it was being displayed, it read: “Rob Meadgay.” That didn’t help at all. I’m assuming he thought I used the word gay in the gender sense which wasn’t my intention at all. Strike three, you’re out!
I gave up that night and went to bed. The Tuesday before FOWD, I found a solution and was able to fix the problem. I tried to upload the changes but I was removed access from bloggingtips’ FTP. I saw Kevin online and he said:
“It’s been more than 6 weeks since you took on this project and in the last week 2 deadlines you have gave me have been missed. I don’t like doing business like this. It’s become a real hassle and has wasted a lot of my time.”
After chatting over an hour about the issue, I found out that there were some communication problems which could have been easily avoided. Kevin thought I was a full-time web designer:
“ptah – I didnt even know you went to school – I assumed you were a full designer”
“I thought you were self employed via the web which is why I was so baffled at you taking so long for everything.”
On my about page which has been up since this blog started, I clearly stated that I’m a student and that I have a job. I do freelancing part-time.
So I made a few mistakes and learned my lesson. There are no hard feelings between Kevin and I, we parted on good terms. Kevin plans on getting a web design company to redesign his blog in hopes to get a better service. He said the new design would be up on 21st and maybe an extra day or so to make sure everything’s ok. Well, it’s the 28th and I still see the old design… the redesign I made for bloggingtips could have been easily up running already… I have nothing to say.
Now that school’s about done and I don’t plan on attending anymore conferences anytime soon, I’ll have plenty of time to work on those mistakes so that won’t ever happen again. Looking back, I would have given him a nice discount for my troubles like I do with for all my other clients (if something ever happens like this) but the gig was already free!
In the end, I’m lefted with an awesome looking theme that has no home. I’ll be cleaning it up for a public release and release it under the GPL license as my first public theme. It’ll be ready by next week, I’m sure you’ll enjoy.
A nice summary Ptah
Well I think it’s only fair if I give my side of the story
First of all, I can assure you that the decision not to use the theme was not an easy one. I had waited over 2 months for the design to be coded and after missing 2 deadlines (which were weeks apart) I lost my patience. It was a decision I didn’t want to make but felt I had to make as this was taking up so much of my time.
You have missed out some points in your post. I don’t want anyone out there to think I acted badly in all of this so I would like to mention some things.
1) I never checked your about page which had information about you being a student. Your first email stated :
‘I’m a web designer/developer with 3
years of experience and currently need to fill up my portfolio’.
This game me the impression you were a full time desginer, and not a student who had lots of other work which was priority. Also, there were a few other times you gave the impression you worked full time as a designer. For example, the reference to the office on March 9th when you said :
‘I’ll send you the update tomorrow when I get back in the office’
2) You have only quoted some of the things I have said in our msn conversation. By only selecting some parts of the conversation you are paiting a misleading picture in my opinion. As I said on msn, one of the other reasons which annoyed me a little was the night before the 2nd deadline there was still lots to do with the coding and you were very slow at updating it. You then asked me a few times about getting a testimonial and told me not to worry about the coding because it would be ready (which it wasn’t). It was incredibly frustrating as it appeared all you cared about was the testimonial and completing the project was an afterthought.
3) With regards to you writing ‘gay’. I’m sure there was no malice in it but you have to see it from my point of view. You assured me many times the day before that it would be finished within hours. I checked the code a few times and nothing ever changed. The next day I logged on and not only was it not complete like you guranteed it would be, you had written that ‘gay’ code. As you can imagine, it was a bit of a slap in the face. There was also a few other times when you said you were working on something yet the code was never updated. When I queried this you said you were working on the code offline and hadn’t uploaded it. I’m not sure if this was the case or not but it did sound at the time like you may have been saying that to give you more time (well thats how it appeared).
At the end of the day you were right on many counts in this post, a lot of this could have been avoided if we communicated a little better. I need to take on some of the blame in that respect, I should have stressed from the start what exactly I wanted.
Your a good designer who will no doubt do well online. I just think you took on way too much work than you could handle and the quality of your service was greatly reduced because of it.
@Kevin,
Thanks for sharing your side of the story.
The…
“I’ll send you the update tomorrow when I get back in the office”
…Can be easily explained. I sometimes worked on bloggingtips after hours at my job, which is in fact located in an office environment due to me not having a laptop all the time.
Also, I only quoted what was relevant to the reasons why you called quits on the project thats why I didn’t talk about the testimonial. But if you wish,
Asking you for a testimonial was only because you were going to be the first on my new redesign. My testimonials were going to be featured on the main page so I was a little pressured in getting that up since we planned on doing a simultaneous launch.
In the end, I did take on too much and I’ve learned the consequences. This won’t happen again.
yeah your right about the office statement. As I said, that was me assuming again (they say assumption is the mother of all f**k ups!)
When do you think you will release the theme? Let me know and I’ll make sure I post about it on bloggingtips as many readers will be interested in this.
The fact that you guys parted on good terms is a good thing and a perfect show of your professionalism.
Things could have easily turned into a mud slinging exercise. kudos to both of you.
You get what you pay for?
I’m sure, that when real money is involved, palms get sweaty and critical thinking along with adrenaline (yes, adrenaline!) kicks in, and then deadlines are more likely to be met.