I Regret My $46k Website Redesign (2022)
mtlynch.io
mtlynch.io
First mistake is hiring people off hackernews. The amount of psuedoprofound pontification on this site is mindblowing.
> In my first meeting with DesignAgency’s team, I asked how long they expected my project to take. “How long is a piece of string?” their lead designer asked.
Same point as above.
Developers who focus on philosophical stuff tend to be a pain in the ass to work with on concrete, real-life projects.
The longest I can do is char[tree fiddy]
It's always a bad faith response. If the requirements are hazy, state that. If the task requires investigation and there's a high degree of exploratory work, state that (and state how long you'd be willing to explore before pivoting). If there's multiple outcomes or options that can lead to wildly different time estimates, disclose that.
Every time I've seen it uttered it meant "you're too dumb to understand what I'm doing and you should just shut up, give me money/time and leave me alone". And it's usually also people who overvalue their own abilities that say it too.
You need to work with people that respect you, your business, your work.
It's disrespectful to not only be placed on the backburner, but to be delayed months, and then have your budget inflated. Who knows how many lost potential conversions he missed out on because potential clients were turned off by the original page.
Name and shame.
It if was a small-scale, free open-source project.. yes. But once you exchange money for services, there should be a different level of attention.
I was the technical cofounder of a startup. We spent a similar amount of money on a similar agency, on advisors to tell our designer he was doing a good job, and on content writers who were friends of my business founder. I was gentle in my contrary feedback.
On the engineering side, I let an early hire (a friend of mine) refactor our codebase to future-proof it against our inevitable scale. When I tried to call a meeting and redirect, another senior engineer expressed that he "liked" the new domain-driven approach, and that was that. I should have said "no."
Ultimately we shut down; my cofounder left the company and I didn't do anything that fixed it. The business didn't make sense in retrospect. I still feel a lot of guilt for lighting the VC money on fire.
The author should have grown a spine. I should grow a spine.
A loud alarm should have gone off at this point. There is a mismatch between their processes and expectations and your ones. It won't end well. Same if they were much smaller than you.
Then there is a 600+ comments thread from 2022 for all the issues in this redesign. The link is in another comment.
If the owner of the site reads this, what was the outcome after two years? Did the redesign turn out to be worth the cost?
Design is an invaluable tool. The amount spent on it is inconsequential if it's not leveraged correctly. Spending $100,000 and making two minor changes that triple your revenue is an absolute bargain.
This is a qualified statement that really doesn't add up in my head. No minor change is going to triple your revenue, no matter what ui UX designer says.
I've seen redesign fail spectacularly and deliver incredible results - and they were done by the same people.
Sometimes following the best practices makes things 10 times worse.
Even when you throw AB testing and pretend you are following the data, the sample size changes so much you can't be sure off anything. I've seen A/B tested changes winning in the benchmarks perform terribly in the long run.
So would you have the same chance to hit the needed changes to triple your revenue by hiring a developer for 20$ per hour on freelancer? Absolutely, yes.
I'm not spending a penny on agencies, let the big companies do that
Sure, but that's not 2/3 minor changes.
> offering deals for people who buy right away without abandoning their carts or removing roadblocks from the purchasing process
There is a job in spam advertisement for you yet.
The hard part is knowing what "minor" changes needs to be made.
Unless you have evidence of what the problem is, you're just stabbing the dark. $100k is probably best spent on a session capture tool that allows you to see how/when/why users are dropping off, hire a UX designer who can think up solutions for the highlighted problems, then use the capture tool to gauge effectiveness and sneak up on a solution.
I won't deny that there are great UX people out there with a natural intuition for this stuff. But there's still the problem of figuring out which ones are great.
Old school UX used to involve video taping users interacting with software.
>With GPT 4 the effort is even smaller now.
Thanks to co-pilot, I am building my first website in over two decades. It encourages me in ways that aren't designed to pilfer my heard-earnt dollars with every modification.
The front was probably a fraud to begin with and there was never a plan to do anything other than add you to a list of potential marks.
This just reminded me of this other story about how Accenture ripped $32M for a website that never went live: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32184183
Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32179563
Prob easier to do steps, first logo, then reframe of layout. An entire layout also causes issues for people, thus why increment changes seems to be the norm.
The experience he had while paying the 46k is the bad bit, and I honestly would have called it quits a lot earlier than he did.
You probably had the same chance with a cheap contractor.
The website looks a bit more professional and trustworthy. That could have been achieved by someone skilled for much cheaper.
This is exactly how you screw over someone nicely
This is bad.. If your time and planning management is this bad then you shouldn't be in a position to give estimates directly to clients.
It sounds like this project may have been offloaded to other Devs a few times as it was a less priority so some ramp up time for each new handover.
The site looks good but 45k is wild to me.
The new checkout page look like it has better design, but the information content is the same.
I don't think the new site is worth more than 10k but agencies do tend to charge triple of actual value provided, since there are multiple salaries to pay, not just one freelance dev.
...and that would have concluded my last meeting with this agency.