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  • Wojtek Kruszewski
    Wojtek Kruszewski
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    so what's your web development horror story?
    Hi folk!

    I guess sitting around a fire on a camp in the wilderness would be a better setting for this topic, nevertheless I'd like to ask you about problems you encountered when commissioning webdevelopment.

    So to begin, here's my story. Or rather story of my would-be client (yes - this means it was my fault).

    I was long time ago and I was still a freelancer back then. Hmmm... I'll tell it from client's perspective:

    "It was many years ago and I wanted to build a social network for ******. You know, the usual things: videos, forums + many original ideas not found in other such portals. I had some money saved and looked for somebody to design and implement it. I found a freelancer who's profile and portfolio looked promising. Although he never done any project of this scale on his own, I've noticed he was a subcontractor in several.

    I contacted him, received an estimate (quite an attractive one) and then started discussing the details. Along the way I came up with many new ideas that would make the portal competitive. He shared his ideas also, and we were putting them in a specs document.

    After one revision he said, that the work would take at least five months and he can't wait that long for getting paid. So we divided the project into several parts/milestones.

    As the project specs and the budget grew, I wanted more assurance that it will be successful. For example: what happens if the site just crashes at some point or the performance deteriorates with the number of visitors growing. So I started asking for a technical supports. Maybe a kind of contract stating minimal time of his reaction?

    He was constantly working on some smaller projects to keep his income, but this made our communication slower. In the past I was too slow with one of my ideas and somebody just implemented it before me. I didn't want this time to be the same.

    If I was to invest most of my savings in the project, I wanted to be sure that every detail works correctly, from the usability and availability point of view. So I worked on the specs again (it grew to 70 pages) and sent him another revision, hoping that the quote won't rise too much. Instead he backed off from the project saying it's getting too large for him.

    At the end of the day he shared some good ideas and I haven't lost any money. But I wasted a lot of time with him."


    Had the would-client really told this story, it would probably be a bit more emotional. I can share it because it was long ago. Since then I learned a lot about project management and Agile development, and gathered a great team, so no you can safely contact me and my team with projects like this (-:

    Anyway still I'd like to know other people's stories and learn from them. So if you ever commissioned website development - what problems did you face?

    Maybe the developers charged per hour, but when they reached their estimated completion time the application wasn't even half-baked?

    Or maybe they impressed you delivering the project in-budget and in-time. You were enjoying your shiny new web application and even wanted to order some new features. Original developers were now unavailable so you just found some others. Everything was fine until they looked at the code and shouted "Eeeeeewwwwwww! What a mess. We can't work of that. We need to start from scratch."

    Website development is a high-risk industry. So what your horror story?
    This post was modified on 09 Dec 2008 at 04:18 pm.
    • 07 Dec 2008, 10:10 pm