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I regret my website redesign

mtlynch.io

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Re: I regret my website redesign

#741

Post by suction »

2143 wrote: post #733
suction wrote: post #666

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? D…

> As a German person It's not about anybody's nationality. If one does good work, one does good work. In any country, there's always going to be lots of smart people and lots of not-so-smart people. Big screw ups happen everywhere, even in Germany [1]. > Don't you Americans value written contracts? Americans value written contacts. A lot of things do go according to plan in America (as well as Germany I hope). [1] ht…

Maybe I should have said "as a person being used to German standards of doing business", would that have made you less defensive?

Re: I regret my website redesign

#742

Post by 2143 »

suction wrote: post #741
2143 wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a German person It's not about anybody's nationality. If one does good work, one does good work. In any country, there's always going to be lots of smart people and lots of not-so-smart people. Big screw ups happen everywhere, even in Germany [1]. > Don't you Americans value written contracts? Americans value written contacts. A lot of things do go according to plan in America (as well as Germany I hope). [1] ht…

Maybe I should have said "as a person being used to German standards of doing business", would that have made you less defensive?

> would that have made you less defensive?

Loaded question fallacy [1]. Can't say yes or no without putting myself in a bad light.

I know I was the one who brought it up (and I'm sorry), but I won't make further comments about the "German standards of doing business", because I suspect it'll not lead to any productive discussion.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question

Re: I regret my website redesign

#743

Post by eddof13 »

philliphaydon wrote: post #112
toomuchtodo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People crave consistency. McDonald’s isn’t popular because it’s good, but because the burger you eat in Santa Monica is the same you’d get in Pigeon Forge, TN.

I don't know where Santa Monica and Pigeon Forge are. But traveling around Asia... McDonalds doesn't taste the same between Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand. Infact Thailand burgers are VERY salty...

I wonder if that's particular to Asia, because I've noticed McDonalds is the same as the US in Latin America (gringo safe space), aside from a couple extra menu items

Re: I regret my website redesign

#744

Post by s17n »

bearmode wrote: post #702
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bezos famously had iron grip on the Amazon home page - I guess it worked for them. So yes I agree

The Amazon homepage is dogshit, people used Amazon because it was a service that they really wanted. Amazon's success is in spite of its web design.

But it's not in spite of Bezos being a control freak. It's a good quality in a founder.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#745

Post by golergka »

massysett wrote: post #564
qrohlf wrote: post #62

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…

If it’s anything like the market for home services, the middleman service will be even worse than dealing with vendors directly: a middleman adding a layer of indirection but little value.

I've used marketplace apps for home services, and just as airbnb, the results were often stellar and always at least pretty good.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#746

Post by synergy20 »

dalmo3 wrote: post #483
synergy20 wrote: post #439

he is a marketing genius to me, writing stuff that catching eyeballs that might end up selling more his devices, I feel the postmortem of the website project is really not the point(or true goal here) at all.

Plot twist: it was WebAgency's plan all along.

yes except after the reading Tinypilot image is all over the page, that's why I call him a marketing genius, it's not talking about the product, and it is actually aimed for the product(exposure of it)

Re: I regret my website redesign

#747

Post by shortformblog »

JohnAaronNelson wrote: post #591
shortformblog wrote: post #75

As someone who has worked at a content agency for a decade, let me just say: I feel really bad that this happened to you, and that scope creep is real. I almost feel like you needed to ask for three separate things: A brand identity, a marketing strategy refresh, and then (finally) a website redesign. That all three were combined into one process likely caused this problem to drag on. The agency had its problems, but…

Don’t feel bad. The end result was positive. Sales increased enough that the cost will be made up in a few months. Person actually made out well considering the effect of the work.

But imagine how much further he would be ahead if they came in at time and on budget. He arguably lost half a year of positive benefits because they dragged their feet for so long.

Things can be positive and cost-effective, too.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#748

Post by d1sxeyes »

mtlynch wrote: post #573
d1sxeyes wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Although I agree number of commits is not a meaningful metric, it seems a bit... wrong.

I think if you're happy with this, then OK. For me, 2 hours is an awful lot of work for this.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#749

Post by cool_scatter »

alberth wrote: post #270

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…

I find it hard to feel bad for him. Big N jobs are cushy but there's so much operational headache. Not that owning your own business is much better in that regard, but at least you feel like you're accomplishing something.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#750

Post by cool_scatter »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #40

I can't remember seeing a website redesign in my entire life that didn't make the site worse. Many sites have gone down the tubes due to redesigns while always blaming the failure on something else. Kudos for at least having the self-awareness to realize that your redesign didn't help. To first order, there's (usually) only one site metric that really matters, and that's page load speed. Craigslist still thrives desp…

> to realize that your redesign didn't help

Did you miss the part where it led to a very large increase in sales?

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