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I regret my website redesign

mtlynch.io

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Re: I regret my website redesign

#231

Post by shepardrtc »

mtlynch wrote: post #44
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…

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…

The only goal of a company that has billable hours is to rack up billable hours. If that involves building an amazing piece of work, then that's fine. But if it can be done by blowing off the client and feeding them bullshit, then that's fine too. I watched consulting companies bilk literally millions of dollars out of a household name company by simply lying to people that didn't know any better.

I really respect your philosophy of assuming people are honest. I used to be that way, too. But after working with contractors and consultants and people overall, I think most people will do what they're told, while others will actively game the system. I've found that if you're tough in the beginning and let them know that you're not to be gamed, then you won't have any issues. Business is business.

In any case, "Isaac" was completely full of shit. He knew exactly what was up. He approved all those hours - especially the dev hours that were spent on nonsense bugs.

I know I sound harsh, but I believe everyone can excel if you get past their bullshit and accept only their best.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#232

Post by einpoklum »

debacle wrote: post #61

I live through this every 2 years: - 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 resolu…

> - Marketing team decides they want a new site.

That's your problem right there. And the fact that their decision is the company's decision.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#234

Post by spaceman_2020 »

swalsh wrote: post #84
skilled wrote: post #37

I am pretty sure there are a handful of good (based on Tailwind CSS) template generators which will produce results superior to the pages you received. Sure, you'd need to hire someone to do the logo and the custom icons, but I am certain that would not cost you anywhere near $46k. Furthermore, I cannot comprehend how this actually happened even if you shared all the details. Holy shit, for $46k you could have gotten…

In my opinion, you're not paying $175 for a good looking page. You're paying that premium for an expertise in what will convert, how to build a funnel, and what to measure. I can pay a guy $60/hr in India, and get something that looks decent.

> I can pay a guy $60/hr in India

Man, you’re really overpaying if you think an Indian designer would be $60/hr.

That would be more than the annual salary of a senior FAANG engineer.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#235

Post by rkangel »

> "Structure for serial, incremental results"

This bit was the surprise to me that it was a new lesson to someone who posts on Hacker News. It's a lesson that 'conventional' project people haven't learned but it's Agile 101. It's the absolute basis and core of agile - don't do everything all at once, progressing together and delivering at the end. Instead do the first thing all the way through, and then the next thing.

Doing it has many many benefits: You can stop at any time and have something useful You get to decide whether subsequent things you thought you wanted were actually right and can add/remove/change them You get to take learnings from earlier things and use them when doing later things[1] As client (stakeholder) you get actual deliverables so you can judge actual progress, with no room for 'fudging'

[1] This is important and not talked about much with Agile. If you do Waterfall you do your design all at once and don't get a chance to learn any lessons. If you do Agile, you build the first thing and learn some more about your problem and the solutions. You are then better prepared for the second thing, which leaves you even better prepared for the third thing etc. This includes even changing what you thought you were going to do for later things.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#236

Post by coding123 »

It would be great if there was a matching service that:

was not upwork or similar - just a simple listing. I don't want to advertise and market, I just want to get a part time job with like 10 hours a week where I fix react components or even per line of code.

does not take a huge chunk of the interaction profit (most of these services want a percentage, I think that's ok as long as it's less than 1% and not exceeding $100)

I'd imagine the person that hired this company would have rather had some moonlighter help him through - $7-8k would have been amazing for someone like me. I'm not really a designer but I can do some limited design work or create backends.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#237

Post by travisgriggs »

I personally like the way the original web site looks and feels better.

But the tell is in the dollars. Has business gone up since the new site has shipped? If sales go from 45K/mo (or whatever they are now) to 50K/mo with no other attributable changes for a year, then the 46K paid off.

I didn't see anything in the article that addressed what (if any) impact this painful journey has actually done for his earnings.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#238

Post by corrral »

mlyle wrote: post #205
commandlinefan wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they have very different goals than you have I've been seeing stories like this about out of control software projects as long as I've been working as a developer (so since about 1992). The conclusion is always that the root cause is either malice or incompetence - but it's awfully suspicious that software is conspicuously alone in attracting this much incompetent malice. Of course, we hear stories like this about…

> for the most part, when somebody hires somebody else to build a house, they get a house and it costs mostly what they were quoted up front and takes mostly as long as they were told it was going to take. ! Every single time I've hired a general-- I've had to fight scope creep; fight to get them to actually complete work; fight to get the actual quoted materials; fight to fix problematic subcontractor work; fight to…

> Every single time I've hired a general-- I've had to fight scope creep; fight to get them to actually complete work; fight to get the actual quoted materials; fight to fix problematic subcontractor work; fight to avoid price increases.

Our experience with looking into GCs for a kitchen remodel was that their premium was so outrageous and their ideas/plans so mediocre that we were much better off just doing it ourselves.

All the specialist contractors and laborers who actually did the work were basically fine, easy-enough to work with, charged reasonable rates, and did good work.

I think we paid about 1/2 what the cheapest GC wanted (some were way higher) and used much better materials than any of them were calling for in their initial plans they used for their bids. I can only assume their entire market is people with so much money that they don't give a shit what it costs as long as they don't have to do any work themselves. "$15,000 to save me some googling and phone calls? Sure, seems reasonable"

Re: I regret my website redesign

#239

Post by tgv »

s1k3s wrote: post #103

Me too, 1 month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31827449 I was finally lucky enough to find someone on Fiverr. I will be using Fiverr a lot more now. Upwork and Toptal have been a total disaster for me.

99designs worked well for us, but for a few fairly straight-forward design tasks. And the translation and coding was done afterward in-house.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#240

Post by mtlynch »

testplzignore wrote: post #149
mtlynch wrote: post #3

Author here. Happy to take any feedback or answer any questions about this post.

Some feedback from a person who is the target audience of your product: https://tinypilotkvm.com/illustrations/tinypilot-overview-il... is the most prominent image on your site and of little value in my opinion. Rather than have a sketch that looks like it very well could just be a stock image (and my brain is trained to ignore this type of image), I recommend having actual photos that show the same scene. A photo of…

Thanks for reading!

I appreciate the feedback, but the hard part about feedback like this is: how do I identify who's right? Half the people in the thread are saying the old design is better, and half are saying the new design is better.

If I could flip a switch and try the design you're describing and see how it affects sales, I'd try it, but taking professional photographs and redesigning the site is several thousands of dollars and dozens of hours of management time.

>The photos on https://tinypilotkvm.com/product/tinypilot-voyager2 are good. Put them on the home page.

Sidenote: these are actually computer-generated, not photos. Good right?

>And because I like to do free QA testing, here's a bug :)

Ah, good catch! Thanks! Fixed now.

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