We have finally launched http://easylogokits.com/. It was the last thing that we did at work before leaving on Friday, which was the best possible strategy for launching this site. Unfortunately, EasyLogoKits turned out to be one of the most incredible examples of "scope creep" I have ever encountered. The tough thing about it is that the scope creep really wasn't the fault of the client OR us...it was more the fault of accepting a job that had more variables than either of us thought.
When originally presented, this was supposed to be a site that took a user through a very quick, easy, linear ordering process for one of 5 different "Logo Kits" which contain various apparel and promotional items that would be embroidered or printed with the customers logo. When we were presented with the job, the client made it seem as though they really wanted to just harvest the customer data quickly, and would work out any unresolved issues such as missing form fields, expired or incorrect credit card info, shipping address different than billing address, etc, upon reaching the customer by phone to "confirm" their order. Along the way, however, as the site owner was able to see and go through the ordering process as we built out the site, she continually asked for more and more of these potential issues to be addresses by the site itself. Of course she was not wrong for wanting the site to adhere to certain behaviors, but if she had been clear about exactly how thorough she wanted the site to be from the very beginning, we would have quoted her a much higher price, and would have braced for a much higher amount of development time.
We could not wait any longer to put the site up, and I am hoping that by launching it on Friday, and no major mishaps occuring over the weekend, that the client will start to adjust to the site being launched and shift her focus to marketing the site/business and making it work for her, instead of worrying about potential "mistakes" that a user to the site could make, like leaving the state out of their order etc. Remember, this was supposed to be a conduit leading to a follow up call to their customers...a call that is necessary since although the order entry is all done via the site, shipping cost has NOT been included in the calculations the site makes, so they HAVE to make phone contact with the customer to completely close the deal.
There really is no easy way to tell a client "Uh, if someone is going to order even your least expensive product, which is $1500, they probably aren't going to enter info into the form fields sloppily" . That being said, I do intend to add form field verification across the site, but we HAD to go ahead and launch, otherwise while waiting for verification to be added, she probably would have asked for several other "last minute" items to be done to the site. Items that to her seem like not such a big deal, but in reality take a considerable amount of time to do. Somebody had to draw the line, so I did. We bent over backwards to make this site, but without making the launch decision, it might have NEVER went live.
On the upside, it IS a pretty cool site, and both me and my boss learned a lot by dong a job that was so far outside of the box for us.
Now we have other problems, which also involve "scope creep". In order to prevent thinking about them on my day off, I will save those issues for another post.
Now get over to EasyLogoKits.com and order some awesome embroidered logo / printed logo promotional items for your company.
