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I regret my website redesign

mtlynch.io

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Re: I regret my website redesign

#171

Post by dangus »

testplzignore wrote: post #149
mtlynch wrote: post #3

Author here. Happy to take any feedback or answer any questions about this post.

Some feedback from a person who is the target audience of your product: https://tinypilotkvm.com/illustrations/tinypilot-overview-il... is the most prominent image on your site and of little value in my opinion. Rather than have a sketch that looks like it very well could just be a stock image (and my brain is trained to ignore this type of image), I recommend having actual photos that show the same scene. A photo of…

Yeah, I wanted to give this feedback about this image, too.

Try reading that image from the website on your smartphone. It's very hard to see what's going on.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#172

Post by level »

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 working style to match your price point.

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.

The reality is, small jobs like this are effectively make-work projects for an agency. They typically don't pay enough to be an effective use of time for the agency, but are a way to stay in the black between higher value projects. Small customers become "nuisance" customers as soon as a something better is landed. The team members being swapped out as they are needed elsewhere and newly joining team members then need to re-contextualize and regain momentum, all on your dime.

Your takeaway is correct, don't be a small fish for an agency. If they're busy they won't take your work, and if do show interest, they are desperate for work.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#173

Post by vladstudio »

"Hire an individual freelancer instead of an agency" - as a freelancer, this warms my heart :-) For a project of this size and nature, a one-man orchestra would definitely be a betterr choice.

However, to be fair, I must note that similar problems may happen with a freelancer (myself included). Self-management is hard, and I tend to underestimate, which leads to delays and/or working late.

Clear and frequent commucation is not as hard, but requires a good habit. You may or may not get it from either agency or freelanced.

“How long is a piece of string?” their lead designer asked. -- sounds like a red flag to me!

Re: I regret my website redesign

#174

Post by TheRealPomax »

Aeolun wrote: post #130
giancarlostoro wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tip: Do not take the developers they give you/have on the project. Interview all of them and reject the bad ones. This is really good advise and probably will save many people months of headaches. You wouldn't just hire someone random HR throws your way, why do that with an agency you've never worked with before?

> why do that with an agency you've never worked with before? I don’t see how this works? You ask agency for a developer for your project, you get a developer for the project. Will you just withold payment if they don’t use developers you like?

No, you go "I'm sorry but we're paying you for quality work and the dev you assigned us is clearly a junior dev. If you do not have the capacity to do this job then we would have preferred you simply stated this up front" and then you don't "withhold payment", you make it a contract condition and you terminate the contract and find someone else.

It has nothing to do with developers you _like_, but with developers who are going to deliver what has to be delivered in the timeframe set out in the contract. If an interview shows they're not going to be able to, then the company did not provide you with developer to do the work, they provided you with someone who can't do the work.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#175

Post by mtlynch »

fourseventy wrote: post #53
mtlynch wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for reading! I have a different philosophy when it comes to hiring in that I assume the people working with me are honest and they're motivated to do their jobs well. I'm paying for their time, and I assume they'll use their time effectively. If they can't use their time effectively, I terminate the hire, but I don't try to fix it with different policies. I agree that there are payment schemes that will cause…

Ya but your philosophy cost you $47k for work that could have been done in 2 weeks by a competent developer...

I'm sure there's a dev who could have done the same work faster and cheaper, but they're extremely hard to find. Everyone wants to hire a frontend dev who can design and code. They'd either be outside my budget or they'll only take jobs from people with a personal recommendation.

There's also the problem that until you hire them, you can't distinguish between a talented developer and someone just pretending to be one. I might go through 10 expensive developers over a year before I find one who's actually capable of delivering the project in two weeks.

Do you have a recommendation for where I'd find someone who can do this job in two weeks to the same level of quality?

Re: I regret my website redesign

#176

Post by bzxcvbn »

Supermancho wrote: post #85
solardev wrote: post #38

It'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…

> I don’t feel like they meant to deceive me or squeeze money out of me. From the article: > They were so excited about the project and got carried away, but he was going to remove the hours they’d spent redesigning the blog. The management directed the designers to do that work, to see if they could get away with charging for it. There is no doubt, that you were deceived to squeeze money out of you.

And "I've got a lot of my plate but let me see if I can squeeze you in" is one of the most obvious ploy of salespeople.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#177

Post by runnerup »

solardev wrote: post #157
runnerup wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is universally true. Developers (myself included) often just do what they want regardless of what they're told and in a consultancy it has to be billed somewhere. Here, a client was cost a lot of money. But it might not have been directed by a manager! At large corps like MSFT and APPL, this behavior is often lauded by the hacker community because it leads to wonderful things like PowerToys and Gra…

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 project.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#178

Post by dangus »

Vanderson wrote: post #32
mtlynch wrote: post #3

Author here. Happy to take any feedback or answer any questions about this post.

You said you'd next time go with a freelancer as one of your solutions. I'd argue you can run into the exact same problems as you described in your main post, just on a smaller scale. In this comment: > There were still issues, but I was prepared this time. WebAgency kept suggesting new flourishes to the design. I declined them all and told them to focus on the design I’d approved. I’m glad I did because they’d proba…

I think the key is not to hire anyone to do website design.

Hire graphic designers to make logos, illustrations, and come up with a color palette. That's the kind of stuff that can't possibly take weeks and weeks.

The author doesn't need a website design, this site is totally fine with a generic SquareSpace/Wix template.

Get your logos and illustrations and drop them in, and set your colors and fonts accordingly.

Custom website design is complicated enough that it can get into its own little version of development hell, and most small businesses don't need anything that a simple generic page can't handle.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#179

Post by ren_engineer »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #29

I have seen many outsourcing projects with my coachees and with founders, I've managed my own and cancelled several when I was called in to fix them. The key to this kind of work is to understand: The agency is not your buddy, they have very different goals than you have. Too often do I seen people who have nice chats with the agency over a coffee. They are not your friends. You need to write the contract to align th…

outsourcing is usually done so leadership has somebody to blame if their idea fails. Same reason companies like McKinsey exist, usually some exec just uses them as the way to actually implement what they want without directly fighting via internal company politics. If it succeeds, they take credit. If it fails, blame the contractors/consultants

Re: I regret my website redesign

#180

Post by EveYoung »

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…

Even the Pope had to keep Michelangelo focused on the Sistine Chapel and not wander off to work on his tomb.

Not that it matters in this context but wasn't it the other way around? Didn't Donato Bramante try to sabotage Michelangelo by convincing Pope Julius II to give him the Sistine Chapel comission, assuming that Michelangelo would fail (due to his lack of experience in fresco painting) and ruin his reputation in the process?

So Donato Bramante was more a consultant recommending an overpaid design agency hoping to benefit from their failure.

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