> 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.

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.

I've never worked with someone who ever stated "How long is a piece of string?" and wasn't a total pain to work with. Doesn't even matter which side I was on, it's painful to hear it even if you're part of the team that made that statement.

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.

If you don't mind me paraphrasing a bit, I think we can easily win the 2024 Accidental HN Slogan Contest with, "Mindblowing Amounts of Psuedoprofound Pontification.

Not enough alliteration: "A profusion of psuedoprofound pontification"?

Exhibit A

It's a fair cop.

The string comment shows they have contempt for the client right from the git.

You need to work with people that respect you, your business, your work.

“How long is a piece of string?” their lead designer asked."

The longest I can do is char[tree fiddy]

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.

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.

"the author needed to grow a spine" cuts to my soul.

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.

It is totally fine to be placed on the backburner -- but then you should get backburner hourly rates and not pay the same as the big clients.

I disagree, it's about scale. Yes, for a big agency you might be a "small-fry", but for the client, it's their entire dreams and livelihood entrusted into someone they're paying.

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.

> Isaac warned that I was smaller than their other clients.

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?

Yeah, the alarm is the built-in excuse alarm. Isaac is queueing up excuses for things not going well before work has even started.

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.

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.

> Spending $100,000 and making two minor changes that triple your revenue is an absolute bargain.

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.

> 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.

That can happen, it's just that it's mostly a game of luck more than skills.

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

You’d be surprised. I’ve seen it happen a few times. There’s no silver bullet or a guarantee that happens all the time, but I have had my hands in doubling revenue 2 times by redesigning one page. Different solutions btw for different companies. Or a major major client that, because of the redesign, used the product and endes up spending a lot over the course of 2 years. And no I cant just replicate that on command but in some cases it’s not out of the ordinary.

I understand, and okay the UI UX is part of it, I just feel that there is usually other factors involved but I don't know enough I guess.

There are tons of small things you can do to double or triple your revenue, usually by decreasing how much you spend in the first place, but also things like offering deals for people who buy right away without abandoning their carts or removing roadblocks from the purchasing process.

> There are tons of small things you can do to double or triple your revenue,

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.

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.

I often ask non-engineering staff (basically: imposing salesbruhs): "would you want to be treated this way?"

>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.

I’m reminded of a podcast I recently heard that looked into the whole fraudulent industry in India where they just make up colleges sell people on them.

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.

Does anyone have a solution to this? Is there a way to find someone online that will build what they say? Or is it always trial and error, and lost money?

It’s mostly trial and error. Based on my experience, I created a fictional project to identify reliable professionals. Through this process, I found a skilled developer, a UI/UX designer, and a graphic designer. We’ve recently completed an actual project together.

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.

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

(2022)

Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32179563

Think the old site looked fine. Some people use github for their front end of their site which I think is crazy.

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.

You can almost certainly overthink this sort of thing. I've had a Google Blogger blog for eons and I've had a static HTML site on AWS S3. I've been diddling around with a relaunch that keeps getting shoved out for various reasons but I'll probably end up with a new Blogger template with some customizations and call it a day.

I don't know about the 46k, but the redesign looks much nicer to me.

Agreed! I wouldn’t have purchased from the first, but would from the second.

If you want to find the agency, you can look in the September 2021 " Seeking freelancer?" hn thread. I think he should have named them...

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.

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.

Sure, but it's not a guarantee either way.

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.

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?

It’s pretty crazy the OP said they didn’t get screwed over, the entire story had that one phrase over and over in my head and at the end you said they didn’t.

This is exactly how you screw over someone nicely

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.

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.

I like the old site more because it straight up shows me the picture of the device and not just a drawing.

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.

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.

Seems like a good reason to bash the agency. Why wouldn't he name and shame?

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 looks 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.

...and that would have concluded my last meeting with this agency.