I regret my website redesign • Hacker News Board

Re: I regret my website redesign

#91

Post by j4pe » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 3:16 PM UTC

mtlynch wrote: post #44

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…

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…

As a longtime freelancer and agency founder: misaligned incentives are not the same thing as dishonesty. Honestly pursuing your own incentives, and being open about what those incentives are, is really the only honest way to do business.

Broadly speaking, it's not economically feasible for an agency to take contracts that pay $7k (or even $25k, for that matter - I've written about this here https://bonner.jp/posts/the-co-op-consultancy/). So if they can do you a favor, in their minds, by fixing your whole website instead of just three pages - and if you're willing to pay for it - then everybody wins. Right?

That's the difference between a business relationship and being a friend: you may keep your mouth shut when a friend is being imposing, taking too much for granted, because you value the relationship. You would never remain silent in a business context when somebody is spending your money. It's business. They understand.

On my jobs, I'm explicit about what I'm going to do and what I'm not going to do. If my client needs to scale, I'm going to talk them through options for caching and horizontal & vertical scaling. But if my client seems to be dragging their feet on customer development and making poor business decisions about which features to prioritize, well, that's not my role in this relationship.

That said, I would never lead a client into a project backwards the way this agency did. Because I do value the relationship! In that I want you to come back, and pay me more money later. Not because we're friends. That's business honesty.

This situation is definitely your fault - but only because you and your agency had different assumptions about the rules or norms of your relationship. Your agency poorly communicated their intentions, and you allowed that to happen out of a misplaced sense of friendly obligation.

But hey, the new site does look great.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#92

Post by HillRat » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 3:18 PM UTC

jetheredge wrote: post #51

As the owner of a digital product agency, this is really hard to read. It is such a shame that an agency would do this to you. I know you felt like they "did their best", but by setting you up with unrealistic expectations out of the gate they essentially guaranteed that everyone was going to walk away unhappy. Besides, when you go to an agency communication/transparency/team of experts is what you are paying for! Yo…

The agency shouldn't have taken the work to begin with -- the part where the lead admitted that he killed project governance entirely was a bit of a painful moment. Agencies are optimized to work at a specific scale, and it's risky for them to scale up or down for a specific project; in this case, their client fell through the cracks because they were using him as fillable hours and didn't ride herd on their designers. Considering they were working outside of the SoW, those were disputable invoices, but that's cold comfort when you don't have the free cash flow to take this to legal.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#93

Post by spaceman_2020 » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 3:18 PM UTC

Good God, that logo would be $50 on Fiverr, those illustrations would be $10 each, and that landing page would be 2 hours with bootstrap.

This is how you turn $500 worth of work into $45,000 worth of billing.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#94

Post by soco » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 3:18 PM UTC

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…

Upwork? I have okay experiences with people there - not perfect but in range with your stated confidence levels.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#95

Post by giancarlostoro » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 3:18 PM UTC

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…

> 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?

Re: I regret my website redesign

#96

Post by spaceman_2020 » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 3:19 PM UTC

SkyMarshal wrote: post #25

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #10

This reminds me of when I worked for a B2C company in the healthcare space. We hired a freelance designer to redesign our checkout flow and we wanted it done in time for Black Friday, which was by far our biggest day of the year. Of course the project ran long and we crunched so that we could ship the redesign exactly on Black Friday. I think we shipped the Tuesday before (because Thanksgiving) and everything seemed…

Customers/users learn a bad design and get accustomed to it. Any changes, even ones that ostensibly improve it, add cognitive effort and contribute to their aggregate cognitive overload (taking into account everything else they have to learn and remember on a daily basis). The original design achieved “don’t make me think” , and any changes, even improvements, reset that.

This is why I hate all these websites that keep A/B testing.

Just when I get used to a layout, they pull out a new design, completely disorienting me.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#97

Post by runnerup » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 3:20 PM UTC

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.

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 GraphingCalculator.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#98

Post by themodelplumber » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 3:20 PM UTC

This is interesting to read, because it seems both client and vendor had trouble managing boundaries due in large part to a contingency-focused or future-focused decisionmaking style. Some would call it bait-and-switch on the vendor's part, but this was speculative territory for them too, and pretty obviously so based on the blog post.

The need to constantly work in favor of anticipation of future events effectively locked out their ability to execute on established agreements, creating an oscillating wait-and-see pattern.

It's rare to see this happen on both sides of a business agreement. However if these two sides came together again I'd expect to see a similar pattern, not that I'd blame anyone. To work around such an obviously favored perception would require a very difficult change in individual psychology with a lot of focus on practicable alternatives.

A very thorough writeup op, thanks for sharing it.

Re: I regret my website redesign

#99

Post by pmarreck » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 3:20 PM UTC

What is the best payment-structuring model to best align the interests of the person requesting the work, with the person doing the work, while also de-incentivizing things like scope creep and simply "one requirement ends up taking too long and should be considered for dropping prior to completion"?

Is it half upfront, half on delivery?

Is it fee-per-milestone?

Is it hourly rate?

Is it some hybrid of the above?

When a requirement must be dropped, who pays for the hours already sunk into it? Would it be both parties? (by charging half the normal rate)

Re: I regret my website redesign

#100

Post by bsedlm » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 3:21 PM UTC

I think in part the problem is that he is an owner working with an agency, i.e. they're all employees all the way to the top.

like this agency said, "we usually work with larger clients", i.e. we expect that all interactions across companies involve people for whom it's just their job.

BUT, they got (what seems like) the actual business owner on one side, not some dissinterested executive.