> I’m not trying to bash the agency here, so I’ll just call them DesignAgency. They’re based in the US, and I found them through a Hacker News monthly freelancer thread.<p>First mistake is hiring people off hackernews. The amount of psuedoprofound pontification on this site is mindblowing.<p>> 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.<p>Same point as above.<p>Developers who focus on philosophical stuff tend to be a pain in the ass to work with on concrete, real-life projects.
The website is nice, but not $46k nice, the author needed to grow a spine. Just because you're a small client, doesn't mean you're not a client at all. This isn't charity work, but a paid service.<p>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.<p>Name and shame.
> Isaac warned that I was smaller than their other clients.<p>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.<p>Then there is a 600+ comments thread from 2022 for all the issues in this redesign. The link is in another comment.<p>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?
I've been running a design agency for over a decade and have worked on many redesigns (not involved btw with OP). One common mistake I notice among designers, and something I always emphasize to my team, is the importance of designing for the business, not just for aesthetics. Design is not merely a visual exercise; it's a catalyst for business growth. I can cite numerous instances where simple or even major redesigns significantly contributed to a business's success. For example, a redesign of the search animation for a major e-commerce platform once reduced customer complaint calls by 20%. Another time, a comprehensive overhaul of a checkout page resulted in a twofold decrease in cart abandonment. Or the major redesign that led enterprise customers to trust a SaaS product based solely on its appearance and got the big co to adopt their product.<p>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.
Also a bootstrapped founder. I couple of years ago I wanted to build an app for my site and posted the job to a freelance marketplace. I got abundant calls and picked a company that seemed to have an eye for design and a lot of good looking examples in their portfolio. They offered to do a redesign and a bunch of other work I refused - I knew what functionality I wanted and needed just a developer for a few weeks. They needed requirements in 24 hrs and were going to be ready in 2 weeks. I worked overnight to get wireframes and every functional requirement ready. I didn’t hear from them at all for weeks. Finally the deadline comes and I ask for an update. “We just assigned you an app developer”. I looked up the persons app store portfolio and he only had a starter calculator app project. I pinged them and asked for a refund, which they tried to negotiate without completing a single deliverable before the deadline. A deeper look into the company showed their address was just a registered agent in Delaware and not a real place. The freelance marketplace continues to sell my contact information to freelancers and I get at least one call a week from someone with a deep accent offering to finish the “Website project” or “Logo redesign project” We “talked about” a while back (we never did, the project was for an ios app). I ended up doing the app myself and learned a lot more and did it faster than the freelancers. With GPT 4 the effort is even smaller now.
His designer very obviously took him for a ride. If you're conflict averse and running a business, learning to fight for what you agreed is uncomfortable and necessary.
You never waste your money, you just have very expensive lessons.<p>This just reminded me of this other story about how Accenture ripped $32M for a website that never went live: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32184183">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32184183</a>
Think the old site looked fine. Some people use github for their front end of their site which I think is crazy.<p>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.
IMHO old school boiler plate design is a feature. Usability over all the various platforms and basic SEO are important, but easy to achieve with the great tools now available for site analysis. $46k is about two, maybe three orders of magnitude more than I would consider spending on a 3 page website.
People focus about the cost, but I would GLADLY pay 46k if it ups revenue by 60% plus. The added income over the years makes this a drop in the ocean to be honest.<p>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.
so you got played like a fiddle and are too soft to call them out therefore hurting others in the future by omission. explain to me how is that ethical?
Ha! When I saw the mtlynch post on being a bootstrapped founder I immediately looked for this post. It's one of my favorites and I share it with all of my potential clients (I run a development firm and compete with agencies that seem attractive on paper)
Not sure about anyone else, but I got a more info from the original front page than the redesigned front page.
The original page put the product front and center while I had to figure what the product was (visually speaking) on the redesign.
> Their dev estimated that he’d only need a few days to complete the switch, and it would accelerate the rest of the project.<p>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.<p>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.<p>The site looks good but 45k is wild to me.
I like the old site more because it straight up shows me the picture of the device and not just a drawing.<p>The new checkout page look like it has better design, but the information content is the same.<p>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.
Grow a bit of spine and name them. If your experience was bad enough to do an entire write-up on it, what are you so timid about? You're "not trying to bash them"? Why not? A bad experience is worth a naming and there's nothing wrong with doing so.
Because I'm a masochist I usually charge $6.5k for brand, design and development and try to finish that out within a month. $46k isn't crazy for bloated agency prices, but the way they managed to upsell you is pretty scummy.
The new site is also one of those sites you see and immediately close them because they look like all that SEO autogenerated garbage with zero content the web is flooded today. That might not be true for this site, but it <i>looks</i> like it. The whitespace, the generic cliparts, the stylized colors. Everything screams "form over function"
> 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.<p>...and that would have concluded my last meeting with this agency.