Is It Out of Scope? — Web design
Is adding a blog to the website out of scope for a web design project?
Usually yes. A blog is a new content type and template, not a variation on the pages the project already scoped — even on a CMS that technically supports posts out of the box.
The SOW lists a fixed set of pages — home, about, services, contact, maybe a portfolio grid — priced and designed as that set. Partway through the project, or sometimes after launch, the client asks for a blog. It's rarely framed as a new request: "can we just add a blog section, shouldn't be much extra since the site's already built." The site being built is exactly why it isn't a small add — a blog needs its own template (index + single-post layouts), its own information architecture, and its own design decisions the original page list never accounted for.
Is it out of scope?
Yes, in almost every case. A blog is a new deliverable — an additional template and page type — not a revision to an existing page. It's out of scope even when the CMS being used has blogging built in, because the contract priced a specific page count and layout set, not "whatever the CMS is capable of."
Clause typically implicated
Clause typically implicated
Deliverables clause→ — Defines the specific page templates and page count the project covers — a blog is an additional template outside that list.
Example contract wording
Example contract wording (illustrative, not legal advice)
The signed scope covers the [X] page templates listed in the proposal (home, about, services, contact). A blog section is a new template — index and single-post layouts, plus category/tag handling — that wasn't part of that scope. Happy to quote it as a separate line item: [$X] for the templates, or [$X/hr] if you'd prefer time-and-materials.
How MarginFlow flags it
MarginFlow reads the request against the contract's extracted deliverables list, not just keyword-matches for "blog." Because a blog isn't among the page templates the SOW names, the classifier marks the email outside_scope with a plain-English explanation ("requests a new page template — a blog index and post layout — not included in the signed deliverables"), quotes the deliverables-clause language it's grounded in, and estimates a suggested charge based on the contract's per-template rate. It creates an Alert rather than sending anything to the client automatically.