Okay guys…I have a seriously overdue, and ****ed up project I’d like just to get done with now. Here’s the situation: I’m working on a personal blog for a client, with flickr integration.
I hired a temp. employee using the oDesk service (which isn’t all too bad) to code the site for me after I created the design. So I hire this woman from England (whose work is pretty good, and is good with WP/Flickr). The project continued quickly, the prototype was up and running very quickly, the only thing that wasn’t working was the flickr part (and I will never ever work with WP and Flickr again). The dead-line for this project was the end of last month, obviously it’s 20 days overdue now.
The project was going really well at this point, so well I decided to hire her for a second project while she was finishing up the first one. She gave me estimates to be finished with both projects by the end of the month. Anyway, I know she was doing work, and have the proof for that (which is good) from oDesk. However, her computer “crashed” and had to be brought into repair. She immediately notified me of her situation, and told me when she could get back into finishing the project. However, the last time I have received a response from her was 11 days ago when I asked for a sit rep again. As it stands right now, the blog project remains 3/4 done (the flickr part works, not just styled).
The problem here is that I’ve already paid her a total of $300 over oDesk for her previous work up to that point. That $300 covers both projects (the blog and a separate project). So that said, I have $300 already paid to her, an almost finished project, and other personal one that’s half way done. So, I’m pretty sure that $300 is lost to me…which I can live with. However, I’m unsure of what to do to finish this project/tie up this loose end. My client is wondering what’s up, so I sent her an email explaining my situation, and for the time being she seems to understand. But, I have no freaking idea of what to do. This is the worst disaster I can think of happening to me in a project.
What do to? I could finish the job myself, but that might take awhile, and with the project already reaching the $800 mark I don’t want to make overextend if I don’t have to. It’s weird, this was supposed to be a simple, straightforward project…now it’s the biggest project I have to date (money wise), and I don’t understand really where all that time factored in as the client was very understanding. I’m thinking this may be the only reasonable choice I may have to salvage this project, unless I hire someone else to do it…but that probably isn’t a good idea.
Thanks,
Eric Huang
EDIT Also, I probably can’t fix the flickr part either. I understand and can use WP themes, etc…but for editing custom plugins for use with PHP and the Flickr API, I’m lost. This is a problem as well.
