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I regret my website redesign

mtlynch.io

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Re: I regret my website redesign

#671

Post by jwpapi »

mtlynch wrote: post #570
jwpapi wrote: post #359

I think the biggest thing that could’ve been done differently here is hiring through a platform. If you hire through a platform there is a third-party that controls that both parties behave as they should. All agencies and freelancers have tons of incentive to do good work and make the client happy. They basically live off their reviews. Also those platforms have escrow, milestone payments and many more useful things…

Thanks for reading! I've hired from Upwork quite a bit, and I think the problem is that the clients have excessive power and abuse the freelancers/agencies. The platforms typically side with clients in financial disputes, and clients know how damaging a negative review is, so they force the agencies/contractors to do work beyond the contract. The result is that the talented agencies leave the platform as soon as they…

I understand. Good point. This indeed creates a bit of a problem. I might have not needed any work above Upwork level. However I still would avoid scenarios where agencies don’t have enough skin in the game, you said something along those lines in your article anyway.

Good Look with tinypilot.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#672

Post by Cthulhu_ »

latortuga wrote: post #169
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 was ready to fire the agency the moment the author mentioned they were going off script and building whatever they wanted. This was a huge, blinking red flag for me. Why would you keep paying someone when they're doing work you didn't ask for, doing work that doesn't align with your goals, and ignoring what you say?

I think that at the time, the agency upsold the author and they went along with it; after that, sunk cost became a factor. I do believe this is what most agencies will try, upselling I mean.

That said, clients can also be problematic; I recall one where the client paid a fixed amount per two-week sprint, but then really started to stretch out how much work was done within that sprint by basically not signing off on tasks and reporting new features to be added as bugs. It's another case I think of a party not being firm enough about scope.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#673

Post by lelanthran »

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.

> 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.

Most clients know exactly what their goal is ("To increase market recognition", "to increase conversion rate", etc). The scope creep can only happen in a requirements phase[1]. Once a client has signed off on exactly what will be delivered, and what the payments milestones are there's no wiggle room for the agency to continue experimenting.

If you're skipping the requirements phase because "agile"[1], then the work will be over budget, over time and under the scope.

There's very few projects that actually require the exploratory-driven process that agile uses. If you have one of those projects then farming the management of it out to an agency is exactly the wrong thing to do.

[1] There may be multiple requirements phases. For example a large "need to revamp our website" project can be split into multiple serial projects, each with their own requirements phase.

[2] I.e. We'll figure out what is acceptable to the client with constant feedback.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#674

Post by bornfreddy »

raegis wrote: post #630
napbree wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe he should have named the agency. Obviously you never want that to happen to your own agency and would like to think any responsible CEO / owner wouldn’t allow these situations to happen (don’t get me wrong, I appreciate mistakes do occur - but this smells very different), so unless they suffer some consequence, they’ll do it to the next unsuspecting client and keep doing so.

> I believe he should have named the agency. I disagree. (1) There is evidence that his company may profit from the redesign, and (2) he risks being sued for even the slightest mischaracterization in his blog, which requires tens of thousands to defend (at least). I don't see the point in risking the family business over this. Both parties learned a lesson. Perhaps the WebAgency will decide never to have hourly clien…

Respectfully disagree. There is only one side that suffered the consequences, and it's not the agency. There is no incentive for them to change anything.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#675

Post by nerdawson »

bornfreddy wrote: post #653
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I’m very confused why he did not make the agency.

My guess - contractual obligations or some other liability?

What benefit would the author get from naming the agency involved?

There’s a big legal risk involved in doing so and no upside that I can see.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#676

Post by Cthulhu_ »

danjac wrote: post #651
ratww wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I still like Agile and Scrum, as much as other devs might hate it. “Yeah I want REAL deliverables after the first or second week”. Keeps me honest. And will keep me from working with architecture astronauts don’t really deliver anything but hot air and build ultra-extensible structures that are actually impossible to extend beyond the fantasy world of their maker. Or the equivalent for designers.

Scrum is really for low-trust environments where management fundamentally don't trust the developers to deliver - whether because the developers aren't experienced, not very good at self-management, or too easily distracted by shiny things, or because you're an archetypal MBA type who distrusts any underling who might be smarter than you. If you trust your developers (whether in-house or contractors) to do the job yo…

While this is definitely true (I've worked in both kinds of environments), I think the scrum process isn't for low-trust per se, but for managing expectations, especially if you have a larger IT organization. Your direct product owner needs a way to determine how long the development of features can be done, so that they can coordinate and manage expectations with other product owners and other stakeholders (management, customers, etc). I see it as a way to abstract away the individual developers and dev work.

And you probably know that there's a BIG portion of developers who aren't as self-organized or disciplined. You mentioned the shiny things distractions, I think that was a factor in the original post. The other being mismanagement on the agency's side, where they allowed their designers to go out of scope. And I'm not even convinced it's mismanagement, because they turned a $7K project into a $46K project, a 6.5x increase in their revenue off of some small side project.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#677

Post by pantulis »

HillRat wrote: post #92
jetheredge wrote: post #51

As the owner of a digital product agency, this is really hard to read. It is such a shame that an agency would do this to you. I know you felt like they "did their best", but by setting you up with unrealistic expectations out of the gate they essentially guaranteed that everyone was going to walk away unhappy. Besides, when you go to an agency communication/transparency/team of experts is what you are paying for! Yo…

The agency shouldn't have taken the work to begin with -- the part where the lead admitted that he killed project governance entirely was a bit of a painful moment. Agencies are optimized to work at a specific scale, and it's risky for them to scale up or down for a specific project; in this case, their client fell through the cracks because they were using him as fillable hours and didn't ride herd on their designer…

The difference in size between companies imply different operation trajectories. If you are their smallest customer, you are bound to be deprioritized and treated as second-class. If you are their biggest customer, you may well destroy them with procurement and governance processes.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#678

Post by duckmysick »

gabrielizaias wrote: post #418
duckmysick wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am pretty sure there are a handful of good (based on Tailwind CSS) template generators which will produce results superior to the pages you received. Where are they?

Here: https://tailwindui.com/templates

Am I missing something? These are templates, not template generators. To me a template generator is something like theme builders for Wordpress.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#680

Post by galaktus »

kypro wrote: post #119

I don't want to rub salt in the wounds here, but that design is extremely mediocre. The primary mistake here imo was to think you needed professional web design in the first place. You didn't. Professional web design is best suited to companies with a strong brand or websites with complicated UX/UI that needs wireframing. You're just a small business selling KVMs D2C. That doesn't need anything fancy. There are some…

Highly disagree. Usually developers are utter crap in design and cannot do it appropiately in context (he makes The design is okay and due to the inefficiencies he spent too much. But with a better process in place he would have gotten a very good deal from that agency.
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