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I regret my website redesign

mtlynch.io

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Re: I regret my website redesign

#271

Post by encryptluks2 »

latortuga wrote: post #169
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…

I was ready to fire the agency the moment the author mentioned they were going off script and building whatever they wanted. This was a huge, blinking red flag for me. Why would you keep paying someone when they're doing work you didn't ask for, doing work that doesn't align with your goals, and ignoring what you say?

I call this the being too nice mistake. It is like the customer that would watch an employee spit in their food and say thanks to them. Effective leaders do not fear confrontation.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#272

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: I regret my website redesign

#273

Post by DeltaCoast »

alberth wrote: post #270

My heart goes out to this guy ... For those unaware, the blogger left a high-paying job at Google 4-years ago [1] to start his own business and over those last 4-years, unfortunately, hasn't really made any money/profit [2] His blog is a treasure trove of insights and lessons learned along the way. Highly recommend for others to read. [1] https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/ [2] https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-yea…

Thanks for linking!

Re: I regret my website redesign

#274

Post by CodeWriter23 »

mtlynch wrote: post #165
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're getting a little beat up here...I'm not piling on, I am actually interested, because I need to reinforce my skill in this area, do you have any learning to share about how to better assess the character/ethics of whom you are selecting? I do appreciate your honest assessment of your project. One of my investors is pushing me to build a team of outsourced workers; it seems suboptimal to me to say the least. I f…

Thanks for reading! > do you have any learning to share about how to better assess the character/ethics of whom you are selecting? I don't try to assess character because I don't think you can effectively. And I know others disagree with me here, but I don't think the agency I hired was lacking in character or behaving dishonestly. At the end of the day, if I'm hiring someone for $100/hr, they need to produce output…

Thank you

Re: I regret my website redesign

#275

Post by killion »

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…

That is why I was hoping the article would have the conversion rate of the website before and after the redesign.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#276

Post by debacle »

commandlinefan wrote: post #187
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…

> We are an early stage startup It's no different at massive corporate behemoths.

But these kinds of mistakes can kill an early stage startup.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#277

Post by corrral »

commandlinefan wrote: post #187
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…

> We are an early stage startup It's no different at massive corporate behemoths.

"Managed $XX,XXX site redesign that resulted in [cherry-picked numbers to make it look like it improved things when it didn't at all]" looks good on a résumé.

Your managers may not understand much, but they can understand (by which I mean get a thrill out of looking at) before-and-after screenshots on a powerpoint, which may matter when promotions are available.

That's at least as true in bigco as in startups and small companies.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#278

Post by SicSemperUranus »

Wow, as lifelong web developer, you really got fleeced. This reads like a list of rookie mistakes to be honest, but not just on your side. Agencies should know when they're too big for a client, and they often do. It avoids exactly this kind of dissatisfaction.

And yes, they made money, but the hit to their reputation is usually not worth it if you're their smallest client. I dare say they probably didn't even do it on purpose, they just didn't have the bandwidth to actually care about your project.

I've been looking at Scrum more closely recently, and I think this would have been a good use case for it (with you as a stakeholder). This goes toward your point of doing things one step at a time. Scrum sprints are short and deliver value consistently. Looking back, I wish I'd had to use it stringently while I was still working at startups; I believe we would all have been much better off.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#279

Post by FrancizHam »

Hi Matt,

First of all, I'd ignore all the haters in this thread. A lot of people on here are badmouthing the final output when in reality they're wannabe co-founders in the second year of their CS degree. They say they can produce a better output with less cost, I wouldn't be so sure about that.

At the end of the day you made a torturous, exhausting investment that seems to be making fantastic returns for you. So at least you can sleep well knowing that!

The part that sounds fishy to me is that at the very end of the 'rebranding' work he suggested that their you use their in-house developer to integrate the design rather than yours.

As a developer I'd be pissed if my employer gave me some 80% done design mockups and told me to go integrate it into a codebase I'm unfamiliar with. Especially if I wasn't consulted or given the codebase before hand.

They then marked the largest task as a one week job then took five weeks to complete it. It sounds like they used the developer as a scapegoat and continued to tie up all the design loose ends in those five weeks. That would explain why the developer started doing some minor bug-fixes within the first few weeks rather than 'doing the thing' because 'the thing' wasn't ready yet. I could be wrong, but if this is true, my heart goes out to that overworked developer. Hoping you're making the big bucks buddy.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#280

Post by sgtnoodle »

shepardrtc wrote: post #231
mtlynch wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

In my last year of college, a couple friends and I ended up working on implementing a vehicle-to-infrastructure communications demo for the department of transportation. We were doing it for a grade in a special projects class, but we were working with a consulting company that was being paid by the DOT to implement the demo. Toward the beginning of the project, the consulting company folk were very concerned about giving college students any non-trivial amount of scope, and were talking about how they would hedge all their bets by implementing everything themselves and only use our stuff if it panned out.

The demo itself consisted of about a dozen different scenarios. The scenarios were all basically some form or another of geofencing, and it made sense to make a simple framework to get 90% of the way, then specialize for each scenario. The consulting company didn't see it that way, and instead wanted to treat each scenario as a separate unit of work.

Fast forward to the end of the semester, and my friends and I demoed our framework for the professor, and a Motorola radio rep. It all worked and we got A's. It was like 400 lines of python. A couple weeks before the DOT demo, we started seriously trying to integrate with the consulting company's stuff, and it was laughably bad.

The consulting company knew they dropped the ball, but figured the three of us could just scramble to finish it all on top of our framework. The Motorola rep chimed in and pointed out that we already got our A's, and that the consulting company was getting paid $500k. They ended up paying us something like $20K, and it only took us a few hours to implement all the scenarios on top of our framework. The demo went well, and we ended up directly helping the DOT demo it a few more times over that summer.

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