521–530 of 789 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> - 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.
Ideally, who should decide what the public face of the company should be if not for marketing?
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…
> Designers are exactly the same way. Just as technical fiddling is fun and interesting, making new designs from scratch is just as fun and interesting. And, just as fixing bugs is tedious and boring, tweaking designs is tedious and boring. My god, that explains why modern designs and user interfaces suck so much. That, and the fact that many designers work off their gut feelings and personal subjective preferences,…
$46k for those changes holy fucking shit. I’ve charged less than this to design a whole 200m² house. I built a detailed 3d model, secured all the permissions and technical approvals, produced 30 A1 drawings, written a 200 page spec, coordinated engineering, tendered to contractors negotiated the tender, visited the site every two weeks for two years to check they were building it correctly and signed off on thier inv…
Am I out of touch? I think about 30-40k does not sound unreasonable for something like this. You have a redesign, with UX people improving your shopping and cart page + implementation + updating your maze of weird bootstrap theme to the new redesign.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Customers/users learn a bad design and get accustomed to it. Any changes, even ones that ostensibly improve it, add cognitive effort and contribute to their aggregate cognitive overload (taking into account everything else they have to learn and remember on a daily basis). The original design achieved “don’t make me think” , and any changes, even improvements, reset that.
Have to admit, when I saw the two screenshots, I thought the OP's problem would be exactly that, not the agency process. Original design not great but has a big picture of a hardware device, an unmissable order button and some explainer videos. New design much more visually appealing, but looks like a different company, potentially even a different class of product and whilst the order button isn't exactly difficult…
Wonder if OP could A/B test the two designs?
As a small business owner myself, this resonates. I would love to be in a position to be able to confidently pay money to other professionals to make problems go away. Unfortunately, my overall experience has been that hiring any “expert” in a field that I am not also an expert in has a 50% chance of working, and a 50% chance of blowing up in my face and creating more problems. I recently attempted to get a new accou…
We made a similar mistake on Server.pro a few years ago. Our first hire was a designer that had no coding experience. Costed us 130k, 2 years and terrible CSS that is finally getting replaced 5 years later. And our users did not like the design as much as our last one, which also uses bootstrap.
No problem, keep at it! Michael is extremely industrious in his blogging. Several front page posts the last months.
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…
Wait what. He worked for Google and is not able to build a website like this himself?
Contrary to the author's assumption about disincentives, it seems like terminating the contract may have been why all the work suddenly got done. That's when the author went from a customer to a potential threat. If the agency hadn't completed the work (including the "no charge" fixes after the contract ended), I'm guessing we wouldn't have gotten a pseudonym for the agency and project lead.
I'm not following. What threat did I pose to the agency after they had all my money?
$46k for those changes holy fucking shit. I’ve charged less than this to design a whole 200m² house. I built a detailed 3d model, secured all the permissions and technical approvals, produced 30 A1 drawings, written a 200 page spec, coordinated engineering, tendered to contractors negotiated the tender, visited the site every two weeks for two years to check they were building it correctly and signed off on thier inv…
You're not an idiot, you're just comparing rates in two completely different industries for some reason.
Edit: Basically it feels like I currently do an order of magnitude more work for the same money.