“I want you to make a website in 12hours!” A Client is in need of a website urgently. He needs this to be done in a day. This is how we made this website in 12 hours.
Spoiler Alert! It was not bootstrap or tailwind or any template.
So the client contacts me at 10:30 PM while I had randomly applied on a freelance job proposal on freelancer.com.
He wanted an “Eco-friendly” themed website for a paper product which he claimed was made from Eco-friendly materials.
I was bored and took it as a nice challenge to work on, I discussed all the details and decided to start right away.
Burn the midnight oil.
Starting at 11:00PM I worked one hour deciding whether i should use bootstrap or any other template for the job.
“No! I am not gonna use a template.” I took it as a challenge.
I had no time to make designs in figma, I started with the homepage wrote the markup, added sections, added IDs and Classes and then thought of some design in my mind.
I knew the perfect css for what I imagined and one thing that helped me was to include a utility css file which I use in my all websites.
Having predefined fonts, color palettes, margins, padding, and some components. It made my work easier, just had to make changes at few places and then we were ready to go.
By 12:00AM midnight I was ready with three pages, HOME, ABOUT and CONTACT.
It was looking good and tidy but lacking that dynamic feel.
The Next Day
I gave the client some screenshots of pages and components I made received feedback and started my work.
He needed animation in the page so made a classes that would perfectly do the needful and add animations wherever needed. I also had to make the website responsive so added the required styles in a media query.
So eight hours of straight work in making the animations and making the design responsive and after eight hours the website was almost done.
Now I needed the graphics assets to replace the dummy content.
In the meantime I realized that the client had not hired me till now and I was working without any insurance.
So I proposed him my offer and as expected had to negotiate to settle for less.
Things got sus!
I asked him for the assets to what he said he will replace them himself and would take this as a template and not the full website.
Agreed but I suspected something fishy here. The client’s profile was also showing a bad indication.
Still I decided to continue and make all the styling edits. Now I had spend almost 12 hours on the website and it was all set and ready.
The client was impressed but yes he was a scammer. He closed the JavaScript on his browser and told me that website is not working. I asked him screenshots and videos and I could clearly see JavaScripts being blocked on his browser.
He asked me to host it public on GitHub. “Dam! I am not getting paid.” So I contacted one of my friends to upload this website in a private repo on his student github account and publish the pages. Smarter me!
This scammer wanted to steal the code and I could understand this clearly. So finding no access to the pages he writes;
The client says he needs some edits, some additional cards and some more effects. This time I asked him to hire me first and then I will do the rest of the work.
He asked me the rates and I proposed the same rate and without any discount.
I tried to extract some info from him and know more about this guy but whatever he gave was a fake detail calling himself co-founder of some agency and having a load of work.
I tried look for his agency and cannot find it anywhere on the internet. Finally I gave him my number and askd him to deposit the money and then I would do the further edits and deliver him the code.
As expected, he never replied!