Be nice, explain to them that it’s not within the current set of deliverables and it requires additional development time.

I think we ( as freelancers ) fall into the trap of considering every client is looking to shake you down. Of course, as freelancers/contractors we will always run into the client that intentionally makes the phase vague enough to inject added functionality later in order to get it free; your contract should be good enough to set the expectations clearly, stand strong with the deliverables you agreed to ( if this is an ongoing issue you need to review your contractual process, specifically your requirements definition and scoping. As well as improving your ability to spot a bad client ). Your contract is your control over the project don’t forget that.

Again, the boundaries are already set, that’s why you have a contract, re-enforcing the contractual boundaries by saying an item is “out of scope” can only be perceived as an unwillingness to add to the current version or even worse work with them on a future release. So stop worrying and start selling with confidence.

Sell yourself.

Try to sell when your working with a client, instead of saying “out of scope”, say something like, “since this/feature/item is not included within this phase’s deliverables we could either add it to a future version or add it to this release if it’s a requirement. Including it in this phase will require … “, then talk about how it may affect deadlines and costs. That’s not the only approach, if you’re in a flat rate project with a strict budget talk about dropping a low priority feature to include this new one; I love this because I have the opportunity to drop one of the more complex features that have little return for the client.

Shane and Eric have it right on, ask the client how to proceed instead of shutting them down and putting them on the defense.

In a nutshell, be nice and know your place on a project.

Facebook’s social plugins allow opportunities to engage and spread your website.

After installing the plugin, head over to the Widget’s section and start adding facebook to your site.

After installing you’ll have the ability to add each social plugin as a widget on your site.

, just after their announcement about their new social plugins I took the opportunity to build out widgets wit

Why the change?

Even though our old site served it’s purpose of providing basic company information and some examples of our work it wasn’t fulfilling the needs of our prospective clients. Our new site allows us to feature our projects in a more digestible way, sorting is available and detailed information about some of our larger projects is provided.

The challenge of content.

One of the challenges of creating this new site was content. I personally don’t like writing but sections needed to be written:

• Homepage – This was easy, since the images were done well before the design was complete and the other content is generated from other sections of the site.
• Portfolio – I’m really proud of this section, I’ll review it more below.
• Services – If you’re a services company this is a no brainer.
• Services > WordPress – A lot of our current business consists of WP and creating a new section detailing out our services for WordPress was a priority.
• Process – It’s purpose is to show the prospective clients our professional workflow. Even though we tend to primarily freelance, providing our process up-front will allow us to build some respect for the work we do. It’s also great to reference to the site instead of copy-pasting it into future emails.
• Testimonials – Hoping to get more in the coming weeks. I went the route of styling the bubble a’la twitter with all CSS ( no images ).
• About – Linked to from the homepage and navigation this is a place for someone to get familiar with our business.
• Blog – I hope to update this at least twice a month, but no guarantees.

What’s so special?

The portfolio section was the main focus of the site, a lot of work was put into getting it just right.

• Custom functions were built in order to return clean results for AJAX.
• The jQuery quicksand plugin was used to create the UI/X.
• The template is also used for category pages and tag pages.
• WP post thumbnails were not used, but a custom function to return the post images was created.

There’s a lot behind this one page, somethings I’d love to go into detail in the future.

The project pages use a custom gallery for navigating through project images. Check out the current featured project to see how it works.

@fontface we’re using typekit to serve up some complimentary type.

Custom templates were made to change the background and colors, these templates will be used for future landing pages ( examples soon ).

That’s not it.

I hope to blog more here, so please subscribe to our feed.

You can also connect with us on your social network of choice:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Linkedin
• or my personal WordPress.org profile