Scope Creep Examples — Web design
Migrating years of old blog content, never scoped originally
The new site launched with fresh content as scoped. The client asks for several years of old blog posts from the previous site to be migrated over and reformatted.
The proposal scoped a new site design and build with fresh, newly written content — the old site's blog archive was never mentioned or included. After launch, the client realizes their old blog has years of posts that get organic traffic and asks for all of them to be migrated into the new site's design, reformatted to match the new templates. Migrating dozens or hundreds of old posts, cleaning up formatting, and fitting them into new templates is a substantial, separate content-operations task.
Clause typically implicated
Clause typically implicated
Out-of-scope clause→ — The original scope was new content on a new site — migrating an old content archive is a distinct, unscoped body of work, however related it feels.
Suggested change-order wording
Suggested change-order wording (illustrative, not legal advice)
Migrating the blog archive wasn't part of our original scope, which covered new content on the new site. It's worth doing well given the SEO value you mentioned — I can scope it as a separate project once we know roughly how many posts are involved and whether any need updating along the way. Could you send a rough count so I can put together an estimate?
How this usually resolves
Getting a real post count before quoting matters a lot here, since "a few years of blog posts" can mean twenty or two hundred — the estimate should reflect the actual volume, not a guess, and it's worth also flagging that some of the oldest or lowest-performing posts might not be worth migrating at all.
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