You hire an agency when you can afford to grossly overpay and because time is more important to you than money.
I regret my website redesign
601–610 of 789 posts
Re: I regret my website redesign
#602Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's one thing to factor in employee overhead -- whether it's "20% time" or vacation time or healthcare or just plain inefficiency -- into your pricing model. It's another thing entirely to take a client's contracted hours to pay for something they never asked for -- repeatedly, even when asked to stop. It's both a difference in degree and in expectations between paying for a monthly service vs paying for billable ho…
Honestly you hit the nail on the head here: > If you're an agency and your dev went wild doing random stuff, you don't pass that on to the client (unless you're an unethical outfit like this one), you eat the costs and talk to the dev about better structuring their work. Additionally, if he was “such a small % of their total revenue” it should have been nothing at all to eat the inappropriately high costs on this pro…
Exactly. There are 'billable hours' and 'non-billable hours'.
Work outside of a contract scope is not billable.
Re: I regret my website redesign
#603trending post mortems on HN are a great way to recoup losses
Re: I regret my website redesign
#604Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Craigslist still thrives despite having no features and looking prehistoric, because it's so fast. Google.com homepage looks almost empty. Craigslist and Google's site speed enhances their success, it isn't the cause of their success. Their content is what the user wants. Giving it to them fast is a huge bonus. I don't want to see shit fast. I want to see good stuff fast. If I have to, I'll wait to see really good…
We're talking about the site design. The stuff actually in the site is a separate issue. Most redesigns afaict make the site slower, which is the wrong direction. The content presumably stays the same either way. Case in point: plenty of HN readers click on the comment thread but not TFA. I believe that a lot of the time, that's due to dread of some godawful slow loading page contaminating their browser with tracking…
> Craigslist still thrives despite having no features and looking prehistoric, because it's so fast. Google.com homepage looks almost empty.
Yes, you were talking about site design and you were wrong.
Craigslist doesn’t thrive because it’s a fast site. It thrives because it has great content and is also fast. Craigslist with awful content would not thrive.
Re: I regret my website redesign
#605It's odd that you didn't want to name the agency. They ripped you off =/ No two ways about it. > I genuinely believe that WebAgency tried their best on this project. I don’t feel like they meant to deceive me or squeeze money out of me. We just didn’t match. I was used to working with individual freelancers, and WebAgency was accustomed to larger clients. ...I think that is a very forgiving, but utterly self-doormatt…
They're meant to be serving him. Instead, he was serving them, propping up their sizeable enterprise at the expense of his own (solo with meagre profits ~$20k/y).
The boost in sales since could've been achieved with a modest revamp or be entirely unrelated.
I don't think anyone at his scale should be paying $175/hr for custom illustrations especially when they look like the placeholder illustrations used in every startup template these days. For something specific like illustration, don't trust a random hire from the agency - go via UpWork or similar and find a freelancer whose portfolio you can vet in advance.
He should've used a well-designed Shopify theme for $300 and instead put money towards product photography. That'd get it 90% of the way comfortably and he'd have $40k+ still in his account. (I say this as a 20+ year web designer whose career has been eaten by platforms and templates.)
Re: I regret my website redesign
#606Re: I regret my website redesign
#607Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 accou…
What's 7k? One week of work + client comms ? You can't really imagine anything being completed and deployed in that time. It was a death trap to begin with. They're experience should have flagged this. But both are equally at fault. This is what happens when clients have the lowest bidder mentality. "the cheapest price is always the best option because it's the cheapest."
> This is what happens when clients have the lowest bidder mentality.
Your conclusion is completely at odds with this quote from the article:
> WebAgency quoted the highest rate of anyone I interviewed, but their portfolio best matched the style I wanted.
Re: I regret my website redesign
#608Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It's not at all true that the only goal of a T&M consultancy is to maximize T for any given customer. When you do that, you burn customers, and most consultancies (at least, the ones whose names aren't lit up on the sides of buildings) are extremely dependent on word of mouth and referrals for business. The normal problem here is simple: the bread and butter of a lot of consultancies are a small set of big "house acc…
> because even when you get into things with the best intentions --- and I take 'mtlynch at their word that that's exactly what happened --- circumstances can fuck everything up
The web agency didn't just mismanage the project; they dragged him down the rabbit hole of upselling everything. He wanted a simple redesign - that they agreed to - but instead got a constant upsell to the point of where they were redesigning virtually everything. It wasn't just, "Hey we don't have time for this", it was, "Hey, if you just pay us more, you'll get everything you didn't even know you wanted." If they were so overwhelmed, how did they have the time to figure out what to pitch him?
Re: I regret my website redesign
#609Serif -> Cliche San Serif, CHECK!
Quirky Original Graphics -> Corporate Memphis, CHECK!
Distinctive Colours -> Generic Shades of #0000FF, CHECK!
Crisp Headline -> Something Generic, CHECK!
Sharp image of distinctive looking device, makes you curious, looks like a unit! -> Generic Graphics, CHECK!
And more...
They ruined it!
What a shame it was so good, so perfect before.
The redeeming thing about the new design, if any, is that if you want to sell the company or get investment it might add some value as it makes it look more like a "tech" investment.
Re: I regret my website redesign
#610My 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?
Well he did build a website like this, but thought (incorrectly) that a professional designer/marketer (which is not what a Google engineer specializes in) could build something better.