I regret my website redesign

- Marketing team decides they want a new site.

- I tell them when/how we can schedule it.

- They decide they want to go outside so it can get done "quicker" by "professionals."

- It costs 5-10x what it would in house, the product is harder to work with, using some WordPress plugins no one has ever heard of, it's not responsive on mobile nor usable on our demographic's primary resolution.

- It takes 6-10 months of "clean up" to make the site usable.

- Web traffic, shockingly, has remained completely constant even after spending half of our annual marketing budget on a web site.

- My team is brought in when the agency becomes too slow because the entire team over there has turned over since the project inception.

- We eventually migrate everything over to squarespace or weebly or similar so that the marketing team can just edit things on their own.

- Every lesson above is forgotten in the ensuing 12-18 months.

We are an early stage startup. We've burned through almost 20% of the revenue we've ever brought in on this cycle. Thankfully, finally, we've grown enough to bring on a marketing manager who will I hope put an end to this madness.

They are not going to watch costs for you. They are not going to have their "best people on it" (unless, maybe, you are their biggest client). And everyone working on the project is looking to get their billable hours in. The entire motivation of the organization is to bill as many hours as they think the customer can pay for.

I met a lot of great people in those companies, but I do not miss my time working in them.

Looks like there was poor project management and internal communication on their part, at the minimum their time tracking reports for tiny projects like yourself should be automated.

For small projects like this, we would keep the team to a minimum (lets say one PM, dev, and designer) and the web work wouldn't be started until everything design wise was completed (we do branding first before touching any UI type stuff to make sure the UI is on the same train of thought).

But yea, I wouldn't recommend hiring an agency unless you want to be hands off or having x amount of budget

There could be dozens of reasons for the ways this played out on the agency side of things.

You could very well have kicked this off a year earlier or a year later and gotten different results.

One being a low budget fixed costs agency: Here it was literally all about how quickly can you get it done. The code they outputted was terrible and often done by people who had very little knowledge of best practices. On a technical level this company had the lowest skilled people I worked with, once even asked me how to do an else if, I answered, "Oh you just do else and then put an if like you would normally do with an if." This was not clear enough for them.

One being a high cost enterprise level counsultancy agency: Here I probably did the best technical work but lowest product quality. The Agency prided itself on doing good technical work and doing BDD so they only did what brough value. Mostly I was bored, the work was slow paced as the company and clients cared that deadline and estimates were kept so things were overestiamted to give a solid buffer and then client charged for the hours used to develop it. Which often meant by the end of the sprint it was a case of sitting around doing nothing.

Overall, both cared about one thing. Time.

Personally, I much rather be an inhouse dev at a small company. Get to work without caring about time so much and care about the product.