I regret my website redesign

I think the old site looks much better than the new one. I'd definitely not be paying for any of that.

i'm not fond of commenting on hn-as-marketing-channel posts, even if it's within the bounds of the guidelines, but here goes...

> "I don't try to assess character because I don't think you can effectively."

> "My typical strategy is to just hire and fire quickly. I don't do interviews, and I just hire someone for a small job (5-10 hours) and see how they do."

to restate, you can't assess character in a few meetings/interviews, as there's just not enough data (it's well within the honeymoon period of any human relationship). humans are quite good at assessing character over the long term however. your "typical strategy" is employed, or at least should be, to mitigate the inability to assess character in the short run.

but, you didn't employ that strategy in your situation. fire fast would have been after they didn't deliver the first set of assets--you'd give them one more chance (with fair and direct warning), and after that, they should have been gone. instead, you kept at it for many more months. you failed to manage your own project, and that's really the bottom line learning here, not all the other stuff you wrote about. by the time you did fire them, you had enough data to assess their character and fired them based on that, rather than employing your fire-fast strategy.

that's not to try to condemn you in any way, as management is ambiguous and surprisingly complex (NP hard), but you left a gaping management hole that the agency filled with their own priorities and goals. i've been on both sides of this coin, and one of the unobvious inefficiencies of outsourcing is the need for twice the management (on each side). your solution to just hire a freelancer would work, not because it's a small project and you'd be "rightsizing", but because it'd make it obvious and necessary that you'd be actively managing the project.

Thanks for reading!

>I hate to be blunt but you got scammed. Of course hindsight is 20/20 but I feel like you're approaching this the wrong way if your first reaction was to schedule a call with the scammer and amicably discuss where things went wrong.

Yeah, I'm not sure if I'm suffering from Stockholm Syndrome or if it's just easier for me to empathize with the agency having worked with them face-to-face, but I still think the events are explainable without assuming the agency was dishonest. Hanlon's Razor and all that. I think they overestimated their ability to scale down their workflows to a project of my size, and the rest was just a consequence of that incorrect prediction.

>Also the only mention of a contract I could find was at the end when discussing termination. It's one of the conclusions you drew, but it's crazy that the scope, deliverables and timetable were not clearly defined, especially if you are paying upfront.

Part of the problem was that the boundary between "rebranding" and "redesigning" is subjective. I suppose I could have said, "You're only allowed to change fonts, colors, and the logo, but you're not allowed to adjust layout," but that felt too restrictive. I agree with their argument that we should adjust the design a little bit to fit a new brand.

And if I wanted to, I could have scoped back down to a rebrand in December. In retrospect, that's what I should have done. But I felt like even though the designs went beyond the scope I asked for, they looked pretty good and they were 80% done, so we might as well just use them.

Oh, cool! Sure, feel free to shoot me an email. My contact info is in my profile and on my website.

Kind of unrelated to the original article, but I feel like I’ve had this problem on a smaller scale. something I’m excited to use is DALL-E 2. I borrowed a friends access and tried to use it for my personal website redesign. It did everything I wanted and more. saved me $2K