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…
I regret my website redesign
781–789 of 789 posts
Re: I regret my website redesign
#782"But despite all the missteps and stress, the results might justify all the pain. I expected the new website to increase sales by 10-20%, but it’s been closer to 40%." Should have put this in the beginning of the article. As for all the issues mentioned in the article, trust me on this, it's always like this. I've been that "small client" hiring externals at all tiers: mechanical turk, freelancers, agencies. You ask…
Yeah I'm a little surprised he regrets it. I guess he assumes that a freelancer would have done the same work since his takeaway says so. He may have indeed gotten "service normally reserved for large companies despite my limited budget".
Re: I regret my website redesign
#783Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only goal of a company that has billable hours is to rack up billable hours. If that involves building an amazing piece of work, then that's fine. But if it can be done by blowing off the client and feeding them bullshit, then that's fine too. I watched consulting companies bilk literally millions of dollars out of a household name company by simply lying to people that didn't know any better. I really respect yo…
I actually had a big long response to your approach pointing out how damaging of a mindset that is for design projects, but I think this is more relevant. I worked as a nightclub bouncer for well over a decade. I learned that you can gauge how confident a bouncer is by how friendly and warm they are to people they might have to fight later that night, and by how calmly they respond to people challenging them, physica…
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Re: I regret my website redesign
#784Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
Yes that's the goal of every single blog post from a business owner that gets posted here. It's all marketing designed as helpful advice about running / starting a business
Re: I regret my website redesign
#785Earlier quoted context omitted.
The whole point of agile is that you deliver something every two weeks. Whatever it is you're suggesting, it's not agile.
Delivering "something" and delivering specific items at a fixed rate are different things.
Agile never promised to do the latter (and I've never seen a methodology that succeded at it in a way that was useful in practice).
Re: I regret my website redesign
#786I 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…
Interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing! > 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. Oh, huh. I w…
Couple of questions:
1) Did you pay everything up front or was it a 50% up front and 50% on delivery basis? 2) Did you manage any deliverables on a google sheet (dates, owner etc) or something similar?
Re: I regret my website redesign
#787Digital Agency Owner Here... I have to say, this is difficult to read and it gives a bad name to other agencies. - I think the first "mistake" was not having it as a fixed price. We spend a lot of time up-front defining the scope and get sign off before committing to the work. After that, we roll it through the relevant departments. We take the risk on for bugs/issues (that are within scope) and do the project as a f…
what percent is charged up front?
Re: I regret my website redesign
#788Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agile and scrum are in practice such nebulous terms that while I don’t doubt that you have had good experience with the particular version of these concepts that you yourself use, the agency could well consider itself to be using the same concepts - yet here we are. The older I get, the more I come to understand that the problem with projects is people, not methodology. 30% of IT projects still fail, despite “agile”…
only 30%? I'd have guessed that most IT projects at least fail to achieve goals if they don't crater completely. the bigger the projects, the more they resemble interplanetary collisions.
Helmuth van Moltke (1880): "No plan of operations reaches with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main force." It applies to software projects too, especially large ones. The enemy is the real world (or our lack of understanding of the real world.)
If we look at the original requirements every single project is a failure. If we look at the strategic goals and keep track of all trade offs maybe 30% is a fair guesstimate.
Re: I regret my website redesign
#789Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry but I'm in a few communities with VCs, designers that aren't even 16yo. In the Rust or Deno communities: https://lcas.dev/ is very young for example.
Do you think you could hire Luca for $100?
It depends who I am, I believe he would do it for free.