The benefit of an agency for most companies is that they don't have to keep hiring new freelancers or contractors every few months. They are outsourcing all of that, and the associated overhead, to the agency. Training and managing a team of specialists is not trivial, especially if they are far removed from the focus of the company so nobody really knows how to go about hiring or managing said specialists.
I regret my website redesign
691–700 of 789 posts
Re: I regret my website redesign
#692I read through the post, is there something about how to make sure this doesn't happen? How to catch yourself falling down that slope? They suggested using Freelancers instead of agencies, and that seems like good advice in this context, but I am looking for frameworks that make sure this doesn't happen even in a different situation
Re: I regret my website redesign
#693Most commenters think of this as an honest/dishonest situation on behalf of the agency. A different approach (and the one I'm reading it as) is that 'Isaac' operates as a seller that likes to make 100k per customer or project in any given time.
Not committing to each project, or actually listening, when the customer complains Isaac makes a few adjustments and continues business as usual.
He only cares about that 100k in a few month's time for a project. So now that he got only half of it he probably thinks he did the client a favor.
EDIT: the product is a life-saver for servers, kudos to the developer(s)
Re: I regret my website redesign
#694[dead]
Re: I regret my website redesign
#695Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait what. He worked for Google and is not able to build a website like this himself?
Well he did build a website like this, but thought (incorrectly) that a professional designer/marketer (which is not what a Google engineer specializes in) could build something better.
Why incorrectly? Worked out well considering the resulting revenue increase.
Re: I regret my website redesign
#696I read through the post, is there something about how to make sure this doesn't happen? How to catch yourself falling down that slope? They suggested using Freelancers instead of agencies, and that seems like good advice in this context, but I am looking for frameworks that make sure this doesn't happen even in a different situation
The two things that stand out for me would be:
1. Set deadlines, and hold people to them. Repeatedly missing deliveries means an end to the engagement.
2. Sunk cost. He should have fired this agency much earlier instead of throwing good money after bad.
Re: I regret my website redesign
#697You 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?
If it's not part of the agreed upon scope and they didn't ask for permission, I see no obligation to pay them. They can put the logo in context, sure, but if they end up spending more time on the sketches for that context than the logo itself, that isn't what you ordered.
Re: I regret my website redesign
#698Wow - looks absolutely dreadful for that price. I could have done a better job for free.
Re: I regret my website redesign
#699Earlier quoted context omitted.
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."
> This is what happens when clients have the lowest bidder mentality. Your conclusion is completely at odds with this quote from the article: > WebAgency quoted the highest rate of anyone I interviewed, but their portfolio best matched the style I wanted.
Yeah, it's more of a "highest bidder mentality". That they don't have any experience with hourly billing should have been a massive red flag as that means they need to be very conscious in how they approach the project. That they used this simply as an excuse to deprioritize the project is what caused the problems.
Re: I regret my website redesign
#700Worked for agencies, agree with the conclusion - don't look for an agency if you have a project under 50k$ - this kind of work is too low margin for a full agency (with the whole pipeline of sales, PM, team effort, then their internal cost like HR and finance, etc. etc.).
Such small projects are contractor/freelancer level work.