I regret my website redesign • Hacker News Board

Re: I regret my website redesign

#151

Post by dlandis » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 3:48 PM UTC

> We’d never discussed custom illustrations, but it seemed like a small amount of work, so I let it go.

> “To be clear, the project is still a rebranding and not a redesign, right?” I asked.

It's a very interesting post, but when I read quotes like the above, it seems like such a strange way to deal with an agency you have hired to perform work for you. Think about if this was about a remodeling job for your house instead of a website. If you saw the workers suddenly start repainting a different room or redoing the trim when it wasn't in scope would you "just let it go"?

Re: I regret my website redesign

#152

Post by eddd-ddde » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 3:48 PM UTC

deltarholamda wrote: post #89

You know how, during a big programming project, you have to keep the devs from going "this codebase has a lot of technical debt, let's rebuild the whole thing using Rust and Kubernetes and Deno and move the hosting to Azure and switch databases and use microservices and..."? Designers are exactly the same way. Just as technical fiddling is fun and interesting, making new designs from scratch is just as fun and intere…

This makes a lot of sense, I feel like this is more of a management issue, it should be the responsibility of the manager to keep everyone working on what is initially planned.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#153

Post by dieselgate » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 3:49 PM UTC

deltarholamda wrote: post #89

You know how, during a big programming project, you have to keep the devs from going "this codebase has a lot of technical debt, let's rebuild the whole thing using Rust and Kubernetes and Deno and move the hosting to Azure and switch databases and use microservices and..."? Designers are exactly the same way. Just as technical fiddling is fun and interesting, making new designs from scratch is just as fun and intere…

Yeah I sort of rolled my eyes at all the logo redesigns (especially as these seem to have come first in the process) but it seems Author was fine with it. It’s an impressive read because Author (and Isaac to some degree) seem quite even keeled in dealing with everything.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#154

Post by xwdv » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 3:49 PM UTC

Sometime ago here I posited that America was business friendly because you could decide to simply not pay a company you weren’t satisfied with and usually have no consequence. This is exactly a scenario where that would be useful.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#155

Post by pwython » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 3:50 PM UTC

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #93

Good God, that logo would be $50 on Fiverr, those illustrations would be $10 each, and that landing page would be 2 hours with bootstrap. This is how you turn $500 worth of work into $45,000 worth of billing.

As a designer & developer myself, I agree, the rebranding and new bootstrap template would take a week to deliver at most for ONE person. I'd charge ~$2,000 USD for something like this (30 hours at $75/hr).

Re: I regret my website redesign

#156

Post by treis » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 3:50 PM UTC

KingOfCoders wrote: post #29

I have seen many outsourcing projects with my coachees and with founders, I've managed my own and cancelled several when I was called in to fix them. The key to this kind of work is to understand: The agency is not your buddy, they have very different goals than you have. Too often do I seen people who have nice chats with the agency over a coffee. They are not your friends. You need to write the contract to align th…

>The agency is not your buddy

I was a consultant for a while and this is true. We usually had one or two empty suits per project that survived by getting buddy buddy with the clients. It was kind of a symbiotic relationship with the superstar devs. The superstars did nearly all the work and the buddy buddy devs helped keep the clients happy. But ultimately you're paying a lot of money for someone to be your buddy.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#157

Post by solardev » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 3:51 PM UTC

runnerup wrote: post #97

Supermancho wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t feel like they meant to deceive me or squeeze money out of me. From the article: > They were so excited about the project and got carried away, but he was going to remove the hours they’d spent redesigning the blog. The management directed the designers to do that work, to see if they could get away with charging for it. There is no doubt, that you were deceived to squeeze money out of you.

I don't think this is universally true. Developers (myself included) often just do what they want regardless of what they're told and in a consultancy it has to be billed somewhere. Here, a client was cost a lot of money. But it might not have been directed by a manager! At large corps like MSFT and APPL, this behavior is often lauded by the hacker community because it leads to wonderful things like PowerToys and Gra…

It's one thing to factor in employee overhead -- whether it's "20% time" or vacation time or healthcare or just plain inefficiency -- into your pricing model. It's another thing entirely to take a client's contracted hours to pay for something they never asked for -- repeatedly, even when asked to stop. It's both a difference in degree and in expectations between paying for a monthly service vs paying for billable hours. If you're an agency and your dev went wild doing random stuff, you don't pass that on to the client (unless you're an unethical outfit like this one), you eat the costs and talk to the dev about better structuring their work.

There's also a pretty big difference between spending a LITTLE extra time on a side project vs not even finishing the actual project because your side project became the main focus. This is probably OK: "Hey, here's that finished logo you asked for. By the way, we had plenty of extra hours left, so I spent an hour on this new design mockup... doesn't it fit in much better with the new logo? What do you think, should we consider expanding the project scope to pursue this, or drop it if you don't like this direction?"

That's not what this agency did. They were more like "Ohhhhh yeah we still haven't had time to finish your logo. We need a few more months while we figure stuff out internally. Sorry, you're just not a high priority for us. But hey, one of our designers took half your hours and made this, check it out! Yeah, I know it's not what you wanted, but the logo person is busy. But check it out anyway! C'mon! By the way, if you paid us more, maybe we'd take you more seriously." What bullshit, lol... =/

Re: I regret my website redesign

#158

Post by TIPSIO » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 3:52 PM UTC

hvs wrote: post #63

Having worked for an ad agency (and for a consulting firm) AVOID THEM UNLESS YOU ARE A LARGE ORGANIZATION WITH A BIG BUDGET. 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 the…

It's really not that simple IMO.

If you look at the earlier mockups, they were just as good if not better. I also think they chose the wrong logo from the earlier mocks.

If you are smaller team/org/business, I'd highly recommend just move as quickly as possible with the agency. Less opportunity for scope creep from them and let the creatives rock and roll. They will, without a doubt, want the project done as fast as possible. They will also produce the same work in 1 vs vs 2 vs vs 3 months.

If you are bigger team/org/business, usually you are buying the "process" or "experience". So it's all mute and a team thing.

If you are looking for both, you'll fail like they did here.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#159

Post by mgav » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 3:52 PM UTC

_fat_santa wrote: post #46

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #10

This reminds me of when I worked for a B2C company in the healthcare space. We hired a freelance designer to redesign our checkout flow and we wanted it done in time for Black Friday, which was by far our biggest day of the year. Of course the project ran long and we crunched so that we could ship the redesign exactly on Black Friday. I think we shipped the Tuesday before (because Thanksgiving) and everything seemed…

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…

In the early 2000s I was a professional day trader and Knight was a market-making firm. EVERY single person I dealt with was an absolute crook, happy to break rules and do disgustingly horrible things to enrich themselves, because they were truly incompetent traders.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#160

Post by _the_inflator » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 3:53 PM UTC

I feel sorry for your experience. Glad you took it with stride.

I always try to understand the business model behind agencies. What they do is selling hours or teams. The more, the better.

I worked with so many agencies, for quite some it is almost like a meme: "Oh, your website/service/code is so crappy, we did not expect that! This means additional efforts you have to pay for."

If you ever hear degradations like this, run! It won't get better, even if you pay for. They will always come up with another reason to charge for more hours.