I regret my website redesign

Yeah, I agree. This experience hasn't affected how much I try to defend myself from dishonest employees/contractors. I think the prevalence of dishonest/malicious people is so low and screening is so costly/ineffective that it's not worth it.

>Of course there are people who are not, but I've seen multiple times a pessimistic approach becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most people will reflect back your expectations. If you expect them to be dishonest, slothful, etc, then they will become that. Conversely showing trust/faith will often inspire a person to live up to the ideals. Between reflection and confirmation bias, lowering your expectation of people will lower your results. I've also seen it become a vicious positive feedback loop that ends in extreme distrust, paranoia, and misanthropic misery. Not worth it.

Yes, 100% agree. When someone tells me, "I've put so many controls in place to make sure you can't do X," it's so adversarial that my first though is, "I'd really love to find a way to do X." But if they tell me, "I'm trusting you not to do X because that will cause Y negative consequence for me," then I'm inclined to honor that request because it doesn't feel like we're adversaries.

Let’s look at how I applied those towards my sites:

https://legiblenews.com/ is just a mother fucking website, with dark mode. It’s responsive, accessible, and fast. So fast that it’s unofficially the fastest news website on the planet https://legiblenews.com/speed

https://www.thingybase.com/ is full of childish sketches that I made on my iPad Pro. Each sketch took maybe 30 minutes. It’s fun. It’s whimsical. It’s a website that’s not taking design too seriously, but it works, is fast, and is usable. It’s also modal free, with the exception of the Rails deletion confirmation dialogs that I’ll be replacing with an undo.

And finally my absolute worst designed website is https://www.imageomatic.com/, which is alpha at v0.1, is a super lame sketch with a handwritten tagline.

I am trying to prove a point that people overthink design. What matters is if the product is useful, usable, and if the design looks authentic to the people and company behind it.

Inauthentic design is when small companies throw gobs of money at their sites or applications trying to make their websites look like a billion dollar company, like Stripe.

Authentic design is when a small company, like mine listed above, don’t try to pretend they have a huge design budgets. Inevitably when small companies pretend they have a big design budget, they end up with something that starts looking janky over time because the funds and people needed to maintain it aren’t there.

I've only worked with a handful of clients so far, but the number one thing I care about most is providing an honest service. I estimate rough timelines for each major task in my head, then add a few hours depending on complexity. If I go over that limit, I'm usually working on that task for free until it gets completed (unless there's some major flaw that is causing the slowdown, like previous developer bugs or slow responses from client). The client never sees this process, but in the end they see tasks being completed in a fair timeframe.

If I'm noticing events are causing me to slow down on a client's work (by like a week, let alone the several months OP had to endure), I quickly communicate with the client to let them know & have us work out a plan.

These aren't things that make me feel like I'm doing something unique in this space, because they just feel so simple & basic to how any working individual should conduct themselves. If OP was dealing with a fresh in the field freelancer, still wet behind the ears, then sure, I guess I can see how things can get away from you in your first project. But this is supposed to be an agency with big clients? And they had this many "missteps"?

Insanity. Actual insanity. I'm not trying to rag on "Isaac" too hard here, I'm more trying to word my confusion on whether or not this is the norm for other freelance agencies. I hope not, because the recount reads like a shameful state showcasing the lack of care in this industry.

One of the other surprises from the postmortem was that Isaac said that I was the only client that ever did code reviews for the code the agency was writing. It sounded like they'd had checkbox-style audits in the past for security/compliance reasons, but no other clients had asked for reviews just for the sake of keeping quality and maintainability high. That also hints that they're not normally dealing with owners or stakeholders who'd care or be able to recognize code quality.