We all want our websites to be beautiful and attract users from an aesthetic point of view. But it would be awful to go through the pain of dealing with the loss of customer data and seeing the media rip into you for slcking on security and being hacked if your development schedule was compromised due to “creative creep”.

Quite often it seems that the one place everyone thinks a schedule can be squeezed is the development or QA phase.  Customers are not your QA staff.  ”Beta” on a website can be tech-catchy but in reality sites in beta are QA’d internally as well. Reducing time or expecting 12 hour development days is likely to result in mistakes. These mistakes can be very costly if not caught. A simple SQL injection could result in the theft of customer data and a PR nightmare at worse. Overworking the dev team to finish on time while the creative team continues to “work out” ideas only results in code that becomes reconstructed to manage ideas that are hardly ever simple and will cause tension.

The most important thing I can say is that planning for changes and creative creep would at least benefit your  development team, but that the expected hard deadlines required by development should also be part of the creative schedule.

In short, developers are people too.