I regret my website redesign

You end up hitting scaling issue the agency hasn't hit before, and they're learning on your dime. That scaling could be technical, but also organizational and procedural. Your org may be big enough to have specific legal/regulatory issues to contend with, but the agency has never dealt with those before, for example.

I understand people will almost always be 'learning' in some capacity on every project. "Hey, we're constantly learning! This is great!". I recognize it, but don't always think it's something to celebrate. You'll usually be better off working with an agency that's dealt with your size project/org before.

Thanks for reading!

I have a different philosophy when it comes to hiring in that I assume the people working with me are honest and they're motivated to do their jobs well. I'm paying for their time, and I assume they'll use their time effectively. If they can't use their time effectively, I terminate the hire, but I don't try to fix it with different policies.

I agree that there are payment schemes that will cause even honest people to do poor work (e.g., if I paid someone per kLOC, they'd probably write more bloated code), but in general, I'm not worried about someone deliberately sandbagging a job if I'm paying them by the hour.

Paying by the hour is not perfect, but no payment scheme is. With milestone-based billing, you get into disputes about what is or isn't in scope, and I don't want to waste time on that. It also incentivizes delivering the minimum quality work to meet the milestone and move on rather than focusing on high quality.

I have a rule now that when designing a page, any "money screens" get at least 1.5X to 2X the estimate. I define a "money screen" as anything that leads a company to land a client or land a sale, things like checkout flows, signup flows, etc. Usually that extra time gets sucked up in A/B testing setup and setting up a staggered deployment per region that the biz operates.

Whenever customers push back I tell them the story of Knight Capital [1]. You pay extra for extra assurance that you won't loose a shit load of money in the future.

[1]: https://www.henricodolfing.com/2019/06/project-failure-case-...

I think the sad thing is the contrary to some people's opinions, this is not limited to small "cowboy" companies, it can happen from the smallest to the biggest and it is a mixture of competence, management, desire for profits etc. as it is in most companies.

The biggest difficulty is that you are paying a premium for intangibles when you talk designs and branding. If you absolutely know that your current brand is useless then anything is better than nothing but also you probably don't have to do very much to get better before the returns are diminishing.

Otherwise for design work, although the result might look "OK", it is hard to see how they would justify the money, although of course they will just like Tropicana justified their failed redesign.

I would normally say that you have to know enough about something to pay somebody else to do it well but here the OP does seem to know roughly what is going on so it might just come back to a more formal kick-off process and not getting caught up in the excitement that you just start and worry about it later. Clearly this company could have done a good job so it is not about ability, just management and scoping it properly.

If you hired a mechanic to regas your car's AC, and they give the car back with a full realignment, detailing, etc, all at prices you wouldn't have ever paid in the first place, you would be driving away without even thinking of paying, probably to the nearest ombudsman or law firm.

but at least that mechanic probably would have done the re-gassing first.