So the story is simple, I hired a freelancer to build a Shopify site for me, it was a fixed rate contract at a 4 figure price point with 8 days of delivery. They started the work and as the progress was coming together I noticed that they were using the weirdest way to build a site, for example instead of setting the colors for the background in CSS code they exported the section background from Figma and applied it to the site background.
The site looked awful and I even had to go in and edit some of the work myself. They said it was just as a placeholder and I need to make it responsive first and all will be edited later on, the deadline reached and the site still looks like a piece of garbage. I logged in to UpWork and I noticed they did not even accept the original offer that was sent to them and was left to expire, knowing it may have been an oversight I was ready to honor the agreement if I had a site that looked like the design, so we had a call and the conversation got heated of how ugly it looks and why are they using gradient background images for the site background instead of code, they were uploading everything as an image and calling it code.
I canceled their credentials and picked on the work by myself and another freelancer from UpWork who helped clear all off as I worked the front end, and they did the back end. Then jumped on a call with them and affirmed my dissatisfaction with the quality of work and the 4 digits payment is not going to be released to them, they will only get paid for setting the initial infrastructure, they agreed and I moved forward sending a fixed rate contract of the revised price which we agreed on during the call, they left it to expire and then reached out again saying they want the full amount, and now they are messaging my clients on social media about the website, they have an NDA signed already which prohibits them to speak about it.
What is the best way to navigate this issue through UpWork?
