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I regret my website redesign

mtlynch.io

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Re: I regret my website redesign

#571

Post by xupybd »

nerdawson wrote: post #440
bequanna wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which absolutely makes me think this was a well thought out con designed to prey on those types of fears and maximize the value extracted from the mark. Those lottery phone scams out of Jamaica which target the elderly in the US are almost the exact same scam as what was described here. Promise something, get them to send money, don’t deliver, tell them you need more time/more money. Keep repeating until the mark wal…

Most of my career has been spent at agencies. I think you're attributing malice to what was more than likely routine mismanagement.

Yeah my read is they were having some internal issues and were overloaded. On top of that they hadn't done many projects like this.

Management threw it out to the floor and the floor ran with it like every other job. Feedback went to management but the people doing the work didn't really understand that this client was not like their other projects.

I've been on the other side of this where one bigger client changed the game and we didn't adapt as we were used to things at a different scale. We didn't clean up the mess we inherited fast enough. We didn't put enough resources on the projects and we failed to live up to expectations. We were used to smaller tasks with more limited scope.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#572

Post by totallyblasted »

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 love fixing bugs. Sometimes more than writing new things. Seeing the system health increase as I delete old code, add new tests, and increase performance is very satisfying.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#573

Post by mtlynch »

d1sxeyes wrote: post #346
mtlynch wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the problem here was in using their time effectively. Or, at least, it wasn't the high-order bit. Looking at their task breakdown, there weren't outrageous items like "10 hours - change a button color." The times were a little higher than I'd expect for devs who do this all the time, but not egregiously so. I think I overspent on this project, but I attribute it more to poor communication and poor manag…

8 commits to disable console logging in production? How many hours did they charge for that? I would imagine that it would take more time to commit 8 times than to actually change this…

I don't think number of commits is a meaningful metric.

They billed two hours. It sounds like it's a one-line change, but getting it to play nice with CI is a little more complicated. It was very similar to this change, so two hours felt reasonable:

https://github.com/mtlynch/whatgotdone/pull/745

Re: I regret my website redesign

#574

Post by JumpCrisscross »

frozencell wrote: post #400
bawolff wrote: post #307

> For most of the project, I was sitting on a bunch of partially-complete tasks. The cost of reassigning half-done work and spinning up a new vendor would be almost as expensive as starting over from scratch. The original project budget was 7k, and you ended up spending 46k, for something that didn't really deliver on what you asked for originally. It is really hard to imagine that it would have been more expensive t…

That is very expansive, for a $100 a lot of teenagers could make it.

> That is very expansive, for a $100 a lot of teenagers could make it

These are the $4 devs. Look, a teen coder can hack up a storm. But I distinctly remember a brilliant friend of mine taking a gig in college and not understanding why the small business who contracted him was pissed he’d rebuilt their site in Silverlight. He wouldn’t make that mistake now. But he doesn’t charge what he billed then either.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#575

Post by prawn »

ineedasername wrote: post #557

This sounds like every accidentally toxic (maybe sometimes no accident) contractor relationship I've ever seen. The initial energetic kick off, the slow decline into unimportant details, lowered enthusiasm, and unreturned messages, and so on. Often driven by lack of clear scope from the client & a vendor whose enthusiasm far outpaces even the loose scope restrictions provided. In this case, sure, the author bears som…

For that sort of money, he should've been putting his foot down. He got screwed at every step and could've been aggressively querying every invoice.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#576

Post by baobabKoodaa »

mtlynch wrote: post #562
__derek__ wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ability to write a bad review that's upvoted and read on HN.

If they thought I had a wide reach with my blog, why wouldn't they do good work from the start? My other blog posts about freelancers [0, 1] are to say that they did a good job and other people should hire them, so I'd imagine if they were thinking about the writeup, they'd want it to put more effort into making sure it's positive. [0] https://mtlynch.io/how-to-hire-a-cartoonist/ [1] https://mtlynch.io/editor/

Those things are not mutually exclusive: I'm sure they intended to do good work from the start and they were scared of a bad review after they botched the job. When you terminated the contract they obviously wanted to minimize the damage.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#577

Post by dbingham »

mtlynch wrote: post #441
level wrote: post #172

I recently left a boutique agency of 5 years and I can definitely resonate with this one. Our agency aimed to catch big fish, and we did, but since they are hard to land we'd pick up small jobs in the meantime, just like the project that you're describing here. In my perspective, this isn't someone deliberately ripping you off. I imagine they intended to ship at the cost they quoted, but the team didn't adjust their…

Interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing! > All the variations of the logo and design mocks are clearly overkill for a $15k project. The design team had time to fill and wanted to provide lots of options for you to pick from, as they typically would on a larger project. Those variations are an expectation for $100k clients, and you got the $100k customer treatment, but unfortunately not at a discount. Oh, huh. I w…

Here's the thing I don't get. Did you not have some guarantee of completed work? When they quoted you the $7k, I could see building timeline flexibility into that quote, but I have a hard time imagining building so much flex into the contract in terms of budget that they can hold your work hostage to where you sign the retainer contract. It seems like you should have had some sort of legal recourse to hold them accountable to delivering the promised work in a reasonable time frame before you went the retainer route and found yourself on the hook for an extra $40k. Was there not?

Also, I was surprised by how much you let Isaac get away with. He admitted he badly mismanaged the project, and made decisions that lead to that mismanagement with out consulting you. He badly blew his estimates for you, and was pretty clear that it was his fault. I would have pushed him to eat much more of the losses than he did.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#578

Post by makeitdouble »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #522
andrepd wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

Remembered me of a rumor (or fact?) that almost all Windows 10/11 designers use Mac. And it shows: the end results broke all the UX Windows users were used to.

Graphic design has been a Mac stronghold for basically forever. I remember them being the only exception to the Windows only” rules most companies had for a very long time.

Also as a Windows->Mac switcher myself, I’m not sure breaking Windows UX is a bad thing.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#579

Post by manytree »

fleddr wrote: post #77

"But despite all the missteps and stress, the results might justify all the pain. I expected the new website to increase sales by 10-20%, but it’s been closer to 40%." Should have put this in the beginning of the article. As for all the issues mentioned in the article, trust me on this, it's always like this. I've been that "small client" hiring externals at all tiers: mechanical turk, freelancers, agencies. You ask…

Wow yeah I missed this. Read through most if it and was looking to see if anyone else had already commented my thinking:

“And the new design is WAY worse in every way!”

Honestly it’s hard to tell what it even is with the new design: SaaS product? Contract agency? Flight tracker?

I found the first design to be significantly clearer. I wonder how the author distinguished between revenue increase coming from natural growth vs. the redesign.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#580

Post by freebreakfast »

ale_jrb wrote: post #551
notahacker wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The bottom of the post mentioned that sales have increased by 40% with the new design. It will probably take some time to know if that sticks, but it seems like it works from that point of view, even if it was maybe overpriced.

The 40% increase is ~$18k a month based on the numbers in the article. That means that redesign pays for itself in three months. That's the type of "regret" that I want.
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