I have no joke had roughly what the author wanted done by a person on Fiverr for $25. New logo and simple redesign of a single page.
Got 3 rounds of revisions even.
I regret my website redesign
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Re: I regret my website redesign
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ya but your philosophy cost you $47k for work that could have been done in 2 weeks by a competent developer...
I'm sure there's a dev who could have done the same work faster and cheaper, but they're extremely hard to find. Everyone wants to hire a frontend dev who can design and code. They'd either be outside my budget or they'll only take jobs from people with a personal recommendation. There's also the problem that until you hire them, you can't distinguish between a talented developer and someone just pretending to be one…
At least then you'd have that person for the future.
Re: I regret my website redesign
#223Good 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.
I doubt you could get that level of quality illustrations/logo from Fiverr, but I could be wrong. The actual page redesign, I agree - where would you recommend hiring a designer from if you don't actually know design, then?
I got both of these on Fiverr for about $25 each - I'm very happy with both.
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/donatj/StandardOtter/dd3f2...
Re: I regret my website redesign
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're hot fries. Warm greasy potatoes with a bit of crunch are always good. In 30 minutes? Not good fries.
Wow, you are very lucky if you've never had really bad fries. I've been to places and had undercooked fries, burnt fries, fries with almost no potato in them, soggy fries. McDonald's fries are very okay but they are always okay. They are very rarely hot though, usually quite old, but at least not stone cold like KFC fries (in the UK and Europe we have fries instead of mash with fried chicken). The fries in Belgium ar…
I've eaten some potato based food crimes in my day. Agreed that Belgium has consistently good fries everywhere.
Consistently mediocre (3/5, thoroughly passable) is the value prop of fast food.
Re: I regret my website redesign
#225You 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…
> a lot of technical debt ... let's rebuild the whole thing using Rust and Kubernetes and Deno and move the hosting to Azure etc.
For me, I'm the dev who says: "This codebase has a lot of technical debt. Let's get rid of all of the containers and VMs and kubernetes and artificial servicification, take it off the cloud, and refactor it into smaller programs which do the work efficiently and which can be built and run on basically any machine(s) and cooperate peacefully."
Re: I regret my website redesign
#226I could have done this for like $50…
Re: I regret my website redesign
#227Curious what others think of the icon progression? There was an article a week or so ago about how all cool/crazy/distinctive logo designs trend to boring sameness.
The end design looks like something I'd expect to see on the Delta app I download when I fly and promptly redelete afterwards.
My person favorite, for reasons I don't understand, is the center icon in the first column. I don't know why. I just like it's distinctiveness.
Re: I regret my website redesign
#228I know nothing about this area, but I'm surprised the redesign improved sales by 40%. Also, I get paying for logos and branding, but I'm having trouble wrapping my head around how the website couldn't just be pure 90's HTML with some CSS sprinkled and google js in. How did so much schedule / money go to "refractoring"? Were they doing back end work like integrating with the mailing list or revamping the store logic o…
Thanks for reading!
>I'm having trouble wrapping my head around how the website couldn't just be pure 90's HTML with some CSS sprinkled and google js in.
Oh, how I wish it could just be 90s style HTML and CSS! I'm forever trying to get back to that.
The website is a static site, but it's built with Gridsome[0], a now-defunct Vue-based static site generator. I wanted to be able to write blog posts and documentation on the site in Markdown, and Gridsome was the easiest way I knew to do that, but in retrospect, it was a big mistake.
And there shouldn't be that much JS, but there ends up being an annoying amount for managing the shopping cart. At first, I just had buy buttons that took you directly to the Shopify checkout page. And then I added support for buying a quantity other than one. And then users kept asking for a way to support VGA, so I added VGA-to-HDMI adaptors as an optional add-on. And so a shopping cart seems like the kind of thing that shouldn't be that complicated, but there's been a lot of complexity over the years. If I had to do it over again from the very beginning, I'd have just made it a Shopify template.
>How did so much schedule / money go to "refractoring"? Were they doing back end work like integrating with the mailing list or revamping the store logic or something?
The refactoring was mixed up in the theme migration. We had a lot of code that was like `class="header-image"` and then a CSS class would add a bunch of CSS rules. They didn't like that, so they spent a lot of time rewriting the CSS to use more utility classes like `mx-1`. That way, they can change things at the theme level, and it filters down into all the elements without having to change each class. I think it was a useful refactoring, but it wasn't worth the cost at the time.
Re: I regret my website redesign
#229I 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…
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…
>> motivated to do their jobs well.
Doing their jobs well for their own boss means getting as much cash from you as possible.
Re: I regret my website redesign
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Tip: Do not take the developers they give you/have on the project. Interview all of them and reject the bad ones. This is really good advise and probably will save many people months of headaches. You wouldn't just hire someone random HR throws your way, why do that with an agency you've never worked with before?
> why do that with an agency you've never worked with before? I don’t see how this works? You ask agency for a developer for your project, you get a developer for the project. Will you just withold payment if they don’t use developers you like?
The agencies I've worked actually all let me interview the dev(s) before the contract was signed. If someone didn't seem a good fit we would either get another candidate or renegotiate rates.
This was for augmenting an existing team though, things are different if you outsource a whole project.