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Spinning Straw into Gold - Even with a big budget, you will find it hard to include every item on a client's wish list. Knowing which requirements to table for the short term will help you deliver focused sites on time and on budget. The items that you table for a second iteration might butter your bread later. A happy client might call you in the future when she has more cash to expand her site. Many freelance web professionals are staying in business these days by working with long-term clients who provide a steady, if small, stream of work. Help yourself develop a list of clients like this, and you might begin to enjoy a little stability.
Every time you are asked to expand or change the scope of your site, pull out the functional requirements document upon which you and the client agreed, and discuss how you might best modify this list to accommodate the new request. You might need to drop one requirement for another. Let the client know about these trade-offs, and ask her to help you evaluate them. This is also your time to talk about the additional resources that are necessary to add to the list.
As discussed earlier, the scope of your site might change as work progresses. If Mary the artist tells you at the halfway point that she also wanted to sell art from the Something Blue site and now she needs a shopping cart, you will be able to show her what this change means to her bottom line.
Each time a client change compels you to modify the functional requirements document, give the document a new version number. Keep the older versions of the document so that you can see how the project is evolving (or devolving). If version four of the document differs significantly from version one, make sure you have the resources to carry out the project as it has come to be defined.
Often the new ideas that clients and bosses come up with will be easy to accommodate, and you will not have to ask for more resources. Update the document anyway, adjust the version number, and make sure your client or boss sees it. If you do this consistently, the client will at least understand that all changes to the scope of the project must be acknowledged formally. This will also discourage frivolous changes and help keep you from having to pay the price for scope creep.
Defining your technical requirements early is just as important of a money-saving device as defining your project goal or functional requirements. In the first years of my career as a web professional, I worked on a few sites whose technical requirements were left vague. This lack of clear technical requirements sometimes came back to haunt us. In one instance, we hired a consultant who developed a beautiful site for us. The site was wonderful in the current version of the Netscape browser, but it broke when we viewed it in Internet Explorer. Our target browsers had not been formally identified, and the consultant had assumed that the site needed to work only on Netscape. (As you can tell, this is not a recent story.) After a little tooth pulling, our consultant adjusted his markup and code so the site would work on a wider set of browsers. He also picked up the bill for the extra hours of labor. If we had defined our target browsers early, however, he would have saved time and money, and we would have saved the administrative overhead that was required to facilitate the fix.
Clearly defined technical requirements can keep you from burning up your budget on these kinds of post-production fixes. Explain your needs simply, in plain English. When you have created this language, you can use it again in subsequent Requests for Proposal (RFP) and other web-development documents.
If you are a client, make sure that you turn in this information to your vendor. If you are the vendor, you might have to help your client determine technical requirements. The initial work might seem time-consuming, but it will save heaps of time and money in the long run. Here are some technical requirements that I have been using that have successfully saved me time, money, and stress.
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