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I regret my website redesign

mtlynch.io

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Re: I regret my website redesign

#661

Post by bornfreddy »

eCa wrote: post #633
JohnAaronNelson wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTA sales increased 66%

Yes. But what we don’t know is 1) How would the old design perform during that time period 2) How would a hypothetical $7k design perform during that time period #1 is of course why a/b-testing was invented, while #2 is even more speculative. But we don’t know how much of the 66% can be attributed to the new design.

Also the earnings chart shows a clear upwards trend, so 72k is not really an outlier. Fwiw, I liked the previous design better. No idea how the codebase looked like though.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#662

Post by progx »

OMG, you had the perfect logo in front of your face! Did you really not see it?

Look at your Black-Box, the simple arrow, simple, clean, perfect. That could be used in your Website design too.

Your animal was horrible and the new Airplane logo is senseless, cause you have "Pilot" in your name, but that has nothing todo with an airplane!

Re: I regret my website redesign

#663

Post by quikacct »

dleslie wrote: post #24
queuebert wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I liked your original design. Simpler, to the point, and lower contrast so my eyes don't bleed. Also I am utterly floored at how long programming a web page takes even for these "professionals". Yet another profession that pays way better for way less work than mine (scientist).

I'll second this; the new design both lacks strongly differentiating features from countless other tech companies, and lacks strong objects to focus my attention on. Having a picture of the product was both endearing and reassuring. The new site could just be another rebrand for a reseller of cheap Chinese schlock.

That was my immediate impression as well: no differentiation. The new site does look modern and it inspires more confidence, but the old brand had a clear personality that should’ve been preserved in the spruce-up.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#664

Post by oxff »

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…

The agency was a JS abusing their client so idk why you would just lash out at new great technologies when they weren't part of this.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#665

Post by denton-scratch »

tamrix wrote: post #599
dbingham wrote: post #577

Earlier 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."

The agency I worked for used to offer a "special" for a brochure site. Basically it was a "website-in-a-day" deal. Customer comes to the agency in the morning, meets with designer and manager, and they agree a design (preliminary work has already been done on a logo). Customer goes for lunch, and the design is handed to two devs. Around 4PM the customer gets sight of what the devs have done, and goes home. The devs work on until say 8PM, and probably put in a couple of hours the next day.

Of course, there was then snagging; it wasn't really a one-day job. The whole deal was pretty inexpensive. We used Drupal with a custom theme.

I don't know whether we made money on these projects, but we did end up with a string of long-term customers.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#666

Post by suction »

As a German person, this and so many other stories about customer - business relations gone awry or lost in miscommunication, I sometimes want to scream at the monitor, "why the hell wouldn't you get that in writing???"

The same goes for many work situations where the boss suddenly lowers the pay or fires someone for not filling in last minute for another employee calling in sick on a weekend. How is that possible? Don't you Americans value written contracts?

I am often annoyed by the amount of paperwork needed to make my life go smoothly, from work to private matters to whatever - but the times I was glad I could just point to a written and signed, extremely detailed contract which is the only thing that matters should things ever get in front of a judge, easily make up for the tedious writing and reading of contracts beforehand.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#667

Post by Cthulhu_ »

oxff wrote: post #664
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…

The agency was a JS abusing their client so idk why you would just lash out at new great technologies when they weren't part of this.

It's a pet peeve and a common problem in software development, where developers don't want to do the work that is asked of them because it's not challenging enough (yay another REST API in front of a database), so they add complexity themselves - new, more difficult languages like Rust or Scala (not as much of an issue anymore I think), excessively complex architectures like microservices, DIY infrastructure configuration like k8s, etc.

See also magpie developers. It's not that the new technologies are not great, it's just that in most cases it's not what a client needs, but what the developers want to do. They will have a solution and look for a problem to match.

I mean I'm not innocent of that, I'm looking left and right for problems where I could use Go to solve them with because I enjoy it. But I am aware of the risks.

Anyway the comparison is apt because it happens with developers; I've seen it happen firsthand at multiple projects, and in almost ALL of those, after the consultants left, the company moved back to their own technology, picked something off-the-shelf, or did yet another rebuild.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#668

Post by spaceman_2020 »

raunak wrote: post #245
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve gotten some very good work from Fiverr lately. You have to go beyond the lowest end and find someone in the $50-100 range.

Have any recommendations on designers?

worked most recently with these guys:

https://www.fiverr.com/mamanok

https://www.fiverr.com/ddt_arnulfo

Re: I regret my website redesign

#669

Post by doctor_eval »

rob74 wrote: post #648
lelanthran wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 30% of IT projects still fail, despite “agile” now being widespread. That's a very optimistic statistic, unless "fail" is defined to be something other than "the opposite of success". IOW, a fail is any project that goes over time, over budget or delivers under scope. If you're defining success as "well, we delivered eventually, and we delivered 80% of the requirements, and it only went over budget by 20%", then, s…

Ok, by that measure I guess over 90% of projects would fail. Which would probably be unfair in most cases, because unlike this project, where the scope as defined by the client was 100% clear from the start, most clients when starting out with a project can't really say exactly what they want, so the scope creep is not only driven by the agency, but also (sometimes mostly) by the client.

The problem as I see it is that projects often start without a vision, or even clear goals; even if there is a vision, it ends up getting lost and forgotten in a sea of feature requests.

Not only should we be asking if a project has achieved its original goals once it’s finished, we should be continually assessing progress against those goals throughout the life of the project - yet few projects I’ve worked on actually do this, even when I’ve explicitly requested it.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#670

Post by suction »

oxff wrote: post #664
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…

The agency was a JS abusing their client so idk why you would just lash out at new great technologies when they weren't part of this.

I think the comment was fair; Too often have I witnessed clueless and/or conniving salespeople recommend businesses to move onto Azure or other cloud services when there was very little to gain from it, yet it meant that the cost compared to hosting their very simple ERP software on metal would bankrupt them in the first bad month.
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