Totally right but the real question is “do I really know that my branding is important or will provide noticeably more income”?That does not seem to be your initial question…Sorry, the “Cafe.” in my post should read “cf “ but it got autocorrected.

Thanks for reading!I think design improvements can help even if styles change. For example, if you look at Apple&#x27;s ads from 20-30 years ago[0], they look dated, but they&#x27;re still better than what I&#x27;m capable of creating today with my limited design skills.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tortoisemedia.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;01&#x2F;09&#x2F;photo-essay-apple-adverts&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tortoisemedia.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;01&#x2F;09&#x2F;photo-essay-apple-a...</a>

If it sells, why do you need to stylize it when the style fad will change in two years?Cafe. Sriracha HOT chilly sauce.

I&#x27;ll second this; the new design both lacks strongly differentiating features from countless other tech companies, and lacks strong objects to focus my attention on.Having a picture of the product was both endearing and reassuring. The new site could just be another rebrand for a reseller of cheap Chinese schlock.

I like the original one better too. Theres a picture of the product at the top instead of an abstract diagram, and it reads as more honest + less sterile.

&gt; Also I am utterly floored at how long programming a web page takes even for these &quot;professionals&quot;. Yet another profession that pays way better for way less work than mine (scientist).Opinion from a web dev who has great respect for scientists: Our work isn&#x27;t easy, but what you&#x27;re seeing here is less reflective of the difficulty of the task than the insane variability in web dev pricing. This same body of work from the blog post could&#x27;ve been anywhere from a totally free template (it honestly kinda looks like one) to a $25&#x2F;hr freelance job to this ripoff $175&#x2F;hr agency, or even $150k+ if some inexperienced startup in-housed it and gave it months of back-and-forth stakeholder meetings. It&#x27;s crazy how much variance there is in the cost and pricing of simple web projects. It&#x27;s pretty much just pulling a number out of thin air and finding someone willing to pay that. It&#x27;s very much a &quot;what the market will bear&quot; pricing model rather than &quot;how do I recoup my education&#x2F;training&#x2F;equipment&#x2F;etc. costs&quot; model... i.e., it&#x27;s a speculative bubble pricing with no real relationship to costs that I can see.Certainly I think my profession deserves a livable wage, like any other. However, while my work is difficult, it&#x27;s not any more so than a scientist&#x27;s, or teacher&#x27;s, or truck driver or park worker or garbage collector or landscaper. But more so than the difficulty, again, is the variability.Over the last 5 years, some clients were paying me $20&#x2F;hr, others $35&#x2F;hr, others $150&#x2F;hr (I actually had to negotiate that down because I felt like we were ripping off our clients... but my partner wouldn&#x27;t budge much because it would impact his hourly rate too, sigh). That last job was at an ripoff agency similar to the one in the OP&#x27;s blog post... I was getting paid that mostly to move pixels up and down a page (adjusting whitespace between paragraphs) on a simple Wordpress theme. Meanwhile, the $35&#x2F;hr job had me working on everything from SQL to CDNs to in-memory caches to maintaining LAMP and email servers -- skills that were orders of magnitude more difficult than what I was doing for the Wordpress agency. There is no rhyme or rhythm to how anything in this industry is priced beyond &quot;this is what we think customers will pay&quot;.It is, I think, one of the great tragedies of capitalism that so much wealth and labor value is locked away in growth bubbles that invest not in social good but speculative ROI. If our society were saner, teachers, civil servants, vets, etc. would be better off than CEOs and mid-level tech management. But nope, so much wealth goes to people who ultimately contribute little to nothing to society at large. Who cares if Google launches a 7th chat app? It&#x27;s all just a big ol&#x27; worthless bubble of pyramid schemes. What a waste of human potential.Today I work at a solar manufacturing company because I at least believe in the social good of its output. If I were to switch to tech proper, I&#x27;d probably make 2x-3x the money even though my skills would be largely the same. But I don&#x27;t want to do that because it feels... dirty, like I&#x27;m contributing to the overall decline of our ruthless trickle-up society, working on worthless projects that only serve to make venture capitalists richer at the expense of regular working people. When I hear my peers in big tech arguing about total compensation and stock valuation even though they already make like 5x median wage... I don&#x27;t envy them, I just feel sorry that they&#x27;re so detached from reality. When this bubble bursts it&#x27;s going to be a eye-opener for our society, and I hope it causes a moment&#x27;s pause and forces people to ask, &quot;What the hell were we doing from 1990 to 2020? Why did we spend three decades chasing advertising bubbles while everything was crumbling around us?&quot;

Well we know the agency got well paid for the work. We don&#x27;t know how much the people doing the work got.

I liked your original design. Simpler, to the point, and lower contrast so my eyes don&#x27;t bleed.Also I am utterly floored at how long programming a web page takes even for these &quot;professionals&quot;. Yet another profession that pays way better for way less work than mine (scientist).

Thanks for reading!&gt;Only difference is we did our own implementation from their designs. Working with them as an IC was even worse because they knew I wasn&#x27;t the one signing their checks.Oh, that makes me feel a little better about letting the agency take on the dev work instead of doing it in-house like I&#x27;d originally planned. I feared that there&#x27;d be a lot of miscommunication and confusion if my company&#x27;s dev team had to resolve design issues with the external agency&#x27;s designers. From your experience, it sounds like I was right to worry.

I just want you to know: You&#x27;re not alone. I worked at a company that had a similar experience with a highly regarded web design firm. Only difference is we did our own implementation from their designs. Working with them as an IC was even worse because they knew I wasn&#x27;t the one signing their checks.Some anecdotes:* their new designs actually made our metrics WORSE.* Some of their design work didn&#x27;t cleanly translate to responsive web code very well, so I wanted time with one of their designers and try and come up with some quick solutions to try an adapt it to something you can actually implement. Web design firm didn&#x27;t like this and we were forced to play a game of telephone between a project manager... which as you can imagine racked up a bunch of billable hours.

Came to say the same.  This sounds like a classic bait-and-switch, like you&#x27;d get a used car dealership.

+1 this is ridiculous and the author is complacent.

Why are you so nice?You got tricked. You got scammed. Whether it was through their excessive incompetence or their active malice. You should name and shame.The new design looks like a random free template. It‘s ok, at best.You are a victim here! Don‘t you see it?

Oh, cool! Sure, feel free to shoot me an email. My contact info is in my profile and on my website.

completely unrelated to your post, but just wanted to say thanks for your work on the rebooting of nyt’s ingredient parser. I use it in my project here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cookwherever&#x2F;cookwherever" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cookwherever&#x2F;cookwherever</a> (site is currently down due to the server being physically moved from our house lol). If you are interested in talking more about how i’m using it I would love to share :)

I think the key is not to hire anyone to do website design.Hire graphic designers to make logos, illustrations, and come up with a color palette. That&#x27;s the kind of stuff that can&#x27;t possibly take weeks and weeks.The author doesn&#x27;t need a website design, this site is totally fine with a generic SquareSpace&#x2F;Wix template.Get your logos and illustrations and drop them in, and set your colors and fonts accordingly.Custom website design is complicated enough that it can get into its own little version of development hell, and most small businesses don&#x27;t need anything that a simple generic page can&#x27;t handle.

Thanks for reading!&gt;You said you&#x27;d next time go with a freelancer as one of your solutions. I&#x27;d argue you can run into the exact same problems as you described in your main post, just on a smaller scale.Yes, definitely. In my experience, the smaller scale makes it easy to manage, so you can nip problems in the bud more quickly.&gt;&gt;There were still issues, but I was prepared this time. WebAgency kept suggesting new flourishes to the design. I declined them all and told them to focus on the design I’d approved. I’m glad I did because they’d probably still be working on the website today.&gt;I think you need to do this with every project reguardless of the size of the team you are working with.Yeah, I think it&#x27;s important to be vigilant to some degree, but some people are effective at suggesting useful improvements. TinyPilot&#x27;s in-house devs, for example, will frequently suggest improvements to designs or architecture that will cost more up-front but will reduce costs long-term, and I love those kinds of suggestions.If the agency had a history of suggesting improvements and correctly estimating the cost of implementing them, then I&#x27;d be more open to their suggestions. But their track record was consistently to expand scope and run late, so I wanted to constrain scope as much as possible.

You said you&#x27;d next time go with a freelancer as one of your solutions. I&#x27;d argue you can run into the exact same problems as you described in your main post, just on a smaller scale.In this comment:&gt; There were still issues, but I was prepared this time. WebAgency kept suggesting new flourishes to the design. I declined them all and told them to focus on the design I’d approved. I’m glad I did because they’d probably still be working on the website today.I think you need to do this with every project reguardless of the size of the team you are working with.Design companies seem to want to make customers feel like they are unskilled &#x2F; unable to make design decisions for themselves, but maybe this is all experts? And I can say I have had very stubborn customers in the past, and it was good for everyone involved to have a customer that knows what they want and expects it, even if the designer doesn&#x27;t really like the results as much as their own ideas.

I love your blog, but was the end goal really getting a new website or getting a good story to tell ;)

Next time leave me a message ... you&#x27;ll get more for way less :-)

Thanks for sharing your experience. The new site looks great btw! I see many negative comments here, but hey, live and learn!

Thanks for reading!&gt;I hate to be blunt but you got scammed. Of course hindsight is 20&#x2F;20 but I feel like you&#x27;re approaching this the wrong way if your first reaction was to schedule a call with the scammer and amicably discuss where things went wrong.Yeah, I&#x27;m not sure if I&#x27;m suffering from Stockholm Syndrome or if it&#x27;s just easier for me to empathize with the agency having worked with them face-to-face, but I still think the events are explainable without assuming the agency was dishonest. Hanlon&#x27;s Razor and all that. I think they overestimated their ability to scale down their workflows to a project of my size, and the rest was just a consequence of that incorrect prediction.&gt;Also the only mention of a contract I could find was at the end when discussing termination. It&#x27;s one of the conclusions you drew, but it&#x27;s crazy that the scope, deliverables and timetable were not clearly defined, especially if you are paying upfront.Part of the problem was that the boundary between &quot;rebranding&quot; and &quot;redesigning&quot; is subjective. I suppose I could have said, &quot;You&#x27;re only allowed to change fonts, colors, and the logo, but you&#x27;re not allowed to adjust layout,&quot; but that felt too restrictive. I agree with their argument that we should adjust the design a little bit to fit a new brand.And if I wanted to, I could have scoped back down to a rebrand in December. In retrospect, that&#x27;s what I should have done. But I felt like even though the designs went beyond the scope I asked for, they looked pretty good and they were 80% done, so we might as well just use them.

I hate to be blunt but you got scammed. Of course hindsight is 20&#x2F;20 but I feel like you&#x27;re approaching this the wrong way if your first reaction was to schedule a call with the scammer and amicably discuss where things went wrong.My first instinct, would be to amicably discuss reimbursement of at least parts of the bill, which in my experience an honest agency would consider especially when they outright admit (hopefully in writing) that the work and management of the project was subpar. And in the event that this doesn&#x27;t work, I&#x27;d explore my legal options. 
Neither this rebranding, nor the redesign work you got is worth 46k.Also the only mention of a contract I could find was at the end when discussing termination. It&#x27;s one of the conclusions you drew, but it&#x27;s crazy that the scope, deliverables and timetable were not clearly defined, especially if you are paying upfront.Anyway props to you for publishing this, it&#x27;s very useful knowledge.

Yeah, I wanted to give this feedback about this image, too.Try reading that image from the website on your smartphone. It&#x27;s very hard to see what&#x27;s going on.

Thanks for reading!I appreciate the feedback, but the hard part about feedback like this is: how do I identify who&#x27;s right? Half the people in the thread are saying the old design is better, and half are saying the new design is better.If I could flip a switch and try the design you&#x27;re describing and see how it affects sales, I&#x27;d try it, but taking professional photographs and redesigning the site is several thousands of dollars and dozens of hours of management time.&gt;The photos on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tinypilotkvm.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;tinypilot-voyager2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tinypilotkvm.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;tinypilot-voyager2</a> are good. Put them on the home page.Sidenote: these are actually computer-generated, not photos. Good right?&gt;And because I like to do free QA testing, here&#x27;s a bug :) Ah, good catch! Thanks! Fixed now.

Some feedback from a person who is the target audience of your product:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tinypilotkvm.com&#x2F;illustrations&#x2F;tinypilot-overview-illustration.svg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tinypilotkvm.com&#x2F;illustrations&#x2F;tinypilot-overview-il...</a> is the most prominent image on your site and of little value in my opinion. Rather than have a sketch that looks like it very well could just be a stock image (and my brain is trained to ignore this type of image), I recommend having actual photos that show the same scene. A photo of the device hooked up to a real server (and with neat cabling if you want to impress me). A photo of a laptop showing what the software actually looks like.The photos on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tinypilotkvm.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;tinypilot-voyager2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tinypilotkvm.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;tinypilot-voyager2</a> are good. Put them on the home page.Slow down the screenshot carousels a bit. They go too fast for me to be able to see what is going on. And if there isn&#x27;t already, have a page with screenshots of all of the key features of the product. That&#x27;s what I would want to see to evaluate what the product does.Others have already mentioned this: the old logo was better. You can tell it was made with love. The new logo - this is a common theme - might as well be a stock image.And because I like to do free QA testing, here&#x27;s a bug :)
1. Go to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tinypilotkvm.com&#x2F;instructions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tinypilotkvm.com&#x2F;instructions</a>.
2. Click the first &quot;Read Instructions&quot; button. The URL changes to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tinypilotkvm.com&#x2F;instructions&#x2F;voyager2&#x2F;v2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tinypilotkvm.com&#x2F;instructions&#x2F;voyager2&#x2F;v2</a> .
3. Click Support -&gt; Product Instructions.
4. Click the first &quot;Read Instructions&quot; button again. The URL changes to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tinypilotkvm.com&#x2F;instructions&#x2F;voyager2&#x2F;instructions&#x2F;voyager2&#x2F;v2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tinypilotkvm.com&#x2F;instructions&#x2F;voyager2&#x2F;instructions&#x2F;...</a> which shows &quot;Page Not found&quot;.

I wonder if you considered whether this agency pulls this exact playbook intentionally and repeatedly?I don&#x27;t think they are made up of honest people in the first place.My personal guess is that this is a perfected game that they play with all their customers:1. Give a reasonable quote2. Start the project on a reasonably productive cadence3. Scope creep, deliver items that are outside of what the customer wanted but proves work is being done. Withhold any deliverables that would end the project.4. Repeat step 3 until the customer gets fed up5. Customer terminates the contract, quickly finish the deliverables in the 30 days and wrap it up with a nice bow to reduce the chance of getting sued. Customer got what they wanted – sure, it was over-budget, but we delivered!This company played you, and it was difficult to read the article because of how I wanted to tell you to stop being so forgiving to them through each step of the process. I think there is a time and a place to be a demanding customer.I am shocked you had a &quot;postmortem&quot; with Isaac, and that you even said that Isaac was candid! I absolutely disagree: all he had for you was excuses and bullshit. Isaac&#x27;s kindness, to me, all seems like part of the plan. He&#x27;s there to make it look like they gave it an honest try.I don&#x27;t know why you aren&#x27;t at your lawyer&#x27;s office writing some sternly worded letters.

Thanks for reading!&gt;I would like to ask how you made the correlation between the new site and the increase of sales, I believe that your product is a very good one and would have expected that your intended target, if anything, is less sensible to site designYeah, I tried not to lean too hard on this because I don&#x27;t have rigorous evidence that the redesign caused the improvement. But anecdotally, it seems like it did.Usually when the website sees a significant uptick in sales, I can usually tie it to a particular event (e.g., a new review, new product launch), but nothing notable happened in May or June except that we finished the new designs, and they were some of our strongest months. It could just be that we&#x27;re growing over time, so maybe the same thing would have happened either way.One other change to the website that I feel like is well-supported by this point was changing how we present our products. We used to show four products in our catalog, but in November, we simplified the website to show only our flagship product, and it was almost an overnight doubling of sales that&#x27;s persisted ever since:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mtlynch.io&#x2F;retrospectives&#x2F;2021&#x2F;11&#x2F;#simplifying-to-just-one-product" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mtlynch.io&#x2F;retrospectives&#x2F;2021&#x2F;11&#x2F;#simplifying-to-ju...</a>

First thing, thanks for your post, it has been really interesting.I would like to ask how you made the correlation between the new site and the increase of sales, I believe that your product is a very good one and would have expected that your intended target, if anything, is less sensible to site design[0]:&gt;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%. In July, the TinyPilot website hit an all-time high of $72.5k in sales, 66% higher than before the redesign.[0] I mean it is not like you are selling fashion accesories, if someone wants&#x2F;needs a Tinypilot they actually want&#x2F;need a Tinypilot, and they shouldn&#x27;t be sensible to the looks of the site (and BTW they would probably also want to see a picture of the HDMI&#x2F;VGA adapter)

I think the new design looks awesome. It maybe wasn&#x27;t cost effective and was too painful a process, but hopefully it will pay off!

Author here. Happy to take any feedback or answer any questions about this post.

I was just going to post the same thing. The new logo looks fantastic.

Thank you! I was really happy with how it turned out.

For what it&#x27;s worth, I think your new logo is great.

When I was working on a website for my stepdad, I had to keep re-iterating to him that he should monitor metrics before going off with any re-design. Often he would call wondering if something could be re-designed, something I taught him is that unless it&#x27;s going to help bring customers and money in the door, it&#x27;s not worth it.I get tons of &quot;customers&quot; like this. They want a website that is a reflection of their business. I always tell them the same thing, base your decisions about redesigns in the numbers, let the metrics tell you when it&#x27;s time to redesign to increase engagement&#x2F;click through&#x2F;etc.

did you do anything other than redesign the website that could explain the influx of more sales?Like any campaigns, newsletters, ad buys etc?How do you know the new design is the the correlated cause of the revenue influx?

If the company can&#x27;t handle clients bigger than you, they may not be able to handle you either.

You end up hitting scaling issue the agency hasn&#x27;t hit before, and they&#x27;re learning on your dime. That scaling could be technical, but also organizational and procedural. Your org may be big enough to have specific legal&#x2F;regulatory issues to contend with, but the agency has never dealt with those before, for example.I understand people will almost always be &#x27;learning&#x27; in some capacity on every project. &quot;Hey, we&#x27;re constantly learning! This is great!&quot;. I recognize it, but don&#x27;t always think it&#x27;s something to celebrate. You&#x27;ll usually be better off working with an agency that&#x27;s dealt with your size project&#x2F;org before.

What&#x27;s the reason for &quot;not wanting to be a company&#x27;s biggest client&quot; except maybe inexperience.

In the same vein as companies &quot;not wanting to be a company&#x27;s biggest client&quot; there&#x27;s a reason for not being a company&#x27;s smallest client as well, as this shows well.

Was there ever a follow up to help determine why?  Were repeat customers returning and panicked when they saw a new, and unexpected, layout change?

People crave consistency. McDonald’s isn’t popular because it’s good, but because the burger you eat in Santa Monica is the same you’d get in Pigeon Forge, TN.

Quite to the contrary, Apple makes gratuitous changes to the UI of their OSes on an annual basis.

You can eventually learn to use a bad UI, but you&#x27;ll never learn a constantly changing one.

&gt; Apple gets a lot of flack for keeping design constant over the years, but this is the reason why they do it.I am not so sure, they are turning system preferences into an iPhone app on macOS.

Apple gets a lot of flack for keeping design constant over the years, but this is the reason why they do it.People hate changes to their workflow.

This is why I hate all these websites that keep A&#x2F;B testing.Just when I get used to a layout, they pull out a new design, completely disorienting me.

God, I wish this were printed on the wall of every software design office. Mediocre designs are fine if people know them, because they learn to work around the rough edges to the point where they often don&#x27;t notice them. But a new design (probably also mediocre!) requires way more cognitive load. Tech as an industry is horrible on this front.Just to pick on one example: Android. Google absolutely loves changing the settings and UX on each major version. People use these controls so much they eventually get habituated... until they change and have to go hunting around and learn the new workflows to get back to par. Each one of these redesigns probably wastes millions of cumulative user hours.

Have to admit, when I saw the two screenshots, I thought the OP&#x27;s problem would be exactly that, not the agency process. Original design not great but has a big picture of a hardware device, an unmissable order button and some explainer videos. New design much more visually appealing, but looks like a different company, potentially even a different class of product and whilst the order button isn&#x27;t exactly difficult to find, it&#x27;s not shouting as loudly to act.

Customers&#x2F;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.

In the early 2000s I was a professional day trader and Knight was a market-making firm. EVERY single person I dealt with was an absolute crook, happy to break rules and do disgustingly horrible things to enrich themselves, because they were truly incompetent traders.

I have a rule now that when designing a page, any &quot;money screens&quot; get at least 1.5X to 2X the estimate. I define a &quot;money screen&quot; as anything that leads a company to land a client or land a sale, things like checkout flows, signup flows, etc. Usually that extra time gets sucked up in A&#x2F;B testing setup and setting up a staggered deployment per region that the biz operates.Whenever customers push back I tell them the story of Knight Capital [1]. You pay extra for extra assurance that you won&#x27;t loose a shit load of money in the future.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.henricodolfing.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;06&#x2F;project-failure-case-study-knight-capital.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.henricodolfing.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;06&#x2F;project-failure-case-...</a>

This is a good example of why some people have zero business being anywhere near management. They win the birth lottery and have it easy all their lives by sheer luck, but when a decision has real consequences - this happens.Anyone in the trenches could tell you that rolling out a huge change to a money-making project on a &quot;round&quot; date is suicidal. They just have no idea of what they are doing in the first place - just playing darts - and it usually works due to the ants killing themselves, to make it all happen. Because health insurance.

&gt; Nobody considered that rearranging the layout and colors of the checkout buttons would have such an impact but they did.I hope this was two decades ago because people absolutely should know by now that doing this has the potential for a huge impact.

There is a graph at the bottom that shows the conversion before and after the redesign.

That is why I was hoping the article would have the conversion rate of the website before and after the redesign.

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 normal. Black Friday rolls around and we go into the office and they have our internal dashboard monitors set up with our Black Friday unit sales counts. Spoiler alert: it did not go well. We were something like 25% off of our goal and 10-15% off of our previous year&#x27;s sales. Exec team is freaking out and they order us to revert the design change ASAP in the early afternoon. We do and sure enough, we see our sales start to increase.Nobody considered that rearranging the layout and colors of the checkout buttons would have such an impact but they did.

The logos look like stocklogos from Freepik - indeed I think Freepik has better ones. And $7k - yukes.

I&#x27;ve worked at a few agencies.One being a low budget fixed costs agency: Here it was literally all about how quickly can you get it done. The code they outputted was terrible and often done by people who had very little knowledge of best practices. On a technical level this company had the lowest skilled people I worked with, once even asked me how to do an else if, I answered, &quot;Oh you just do else and then put an if like you would normally do with an if.&quot; This was not clear enough for them.One being a high cost enterprise level counsultancy agency: Here I probably did the best technical work but lowest product quality. The Agency prided itself on doing good technical work and doing BDD so they only did what brough value. Mostly I was bored, the work was slow paced as the company and clients cared that deadline and estimates were kept so things were overestiamted to give a solid buffer and then client charged for the hours used to develop it. Which often meant by the end of the sprint it was a case of sitting around doing nothing.Overall, both cared about one thing. Time.Personally, I much rather be an inhouse dev at a small company. Get to work without caring about time so much and care about the product.

&gt; Hire an individual freelancer instead of an agencyMore people should do this. Many agencies, if not most, prioritize new customer acquisition. If you&#x27;re not their biggest customer, their priority is to do as little work as possible and inflate the cost (partially why they love retainers).Very often a customer like this would be relegated to junior employees in an agency anyway. You can get a freelancer with a lot more experience, and still save money.I worked at agencies for about the first 5 years of my career, and left to freelance when I realized I was already doing most of the work... but someone else was making most of the money.

Thanks for reading! I&#x27;m glad you found it helpful.

Exactly. I doubt it was malice, I mostly suspect an agency used to large clients with no experience or methodology with small ones. A lot of what was set up for his website was stuff that only makes sense if the project is huge.Let&#x27;s say you want to set up a framework and it takes you XL amount of hours. That XL amount of hours is worth it if the website has 15,000 products and 75 pages of content. But if there&#x27;s only one product and two pages, it&#x27;s not worth it.Same goes for the management time that crept into the budget. 20k extra on a 1 million contract is nothing and I would say expected. But on a 7k project? That&#x27;s huge.If the company has a lot of internal processing in between each step, it eats up a lot of the budget. Daily stand-up meetings, agile rituals, pull requests, handover to a QA department and bug fix rounds. Again, this makes sense for a large project but not for a small one.Most companies that are used to a formula that works will not change for one customer.If I had a metaphor, it would be this: If you want to travel 1500 kilometres, it makes sense to take a train. Boarding will be slow and the train will start out slow. But overall, you win. On the other hand, if you&#x27;re only traveling 500 meters, it&#x27;s a bit of a stretch. It is better to take a truck or a car.The problem here is that the company was a train and promised safe travel to the next station 500 meters away. Were they being malicious? I doubt it, they probably made the train trip safe. They probably don&#x27;t know the details of trucking and didn&#x27;t recommend it.Should they have recommended going with a smaller company? Maybe. But I don&#x27;t know if I would consider that malicious. If anything, they should have been more transparent about their internal methodologies and ways of working so that the client could have properly consented to what he was getting into.

I agree. In particular the logo is truly excellent, IMO. It feels like the devs  know what they are doing but are interested in producing quality, not in budgeting for OP. Meanwhile the management didn&#x27;t care about squeezing him.

For what it&#x27;s worth, the new site does look a lot better. A good read, might come in handy to avoid similar mistakes in the future. Key takeaway I think is the one about avoiding being somebody&#x27;s smallest client if you can

you didn&#x27;t want much. It&#x27;s not about sales it&#x27;s about &quot;I want that and if you cant afford that you are not the right customer for me&quot;. 
Thing is that for 1k€ I wouldn&#x27;t even think about a website. 
But thank you that you did give up ... gives some other webdesigners the opportunity to say &quot;hey go fy with you 1k€ ... I want 5k&quot; (no offense)

Sounds about right.  OP could have gotten someone at his beck and call to design his site for 15 dollars an hour.  Instead he got some well-reviewed shyster.  &quot;Our other clients pay 40k a month.&quot;  GTFOOH.

The trail of scorned developers is littered the sad understandings of &quot;Oh, I could&#x27;ve easily made way more money if I was just a little more unethical&quot;.Pesky morals.

I worked as a freelancing web designer a long ago and I always earned around 1k Euro for a whole project including everything or 500 Euro for little programming stuff, of course usually business projects. At one point I was beginning to hate those jobs.Everytime I read those stories, and that happens from time to time, I just ask myself: what did I wrong?(answer is easy: I&#x27;m a good technician but the worst salesman)

Ya but your philosophy cost you $47k for work that could have been done in 2 weeks by a competent developer...

Are you rethinking your philosophy after wasting $46,000?&gt; you get into disputes about what is or isn&#x27;t in scope,This is to your advantage as the one who is able to withhold payment when delivery isn&#x27;t up to your standards, and you are protected contractually. With pure time &amp; materials it&#x27;s much harder to sue for non-delivery unless you can prove they didn&#x27;t work the hours they billed for.

You didnt hire people. You hired a company. That abused your good faith.Also, &#x27;If they can&#x27;t use their time effectively, I terminate the hire&#x27;, appearantly not? They clearly where not using their time, your money, effectively.

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&#x27;s not economically feasible for an agency to take contracts that pay $7k (or even $25k, for that matter - I&#x27;ve written about this here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bonner.jp&#x2F;posts&#x2F;the-co-op-consultancy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bonner.jp&#x2F;posts&#x2F;the-co-op-consultancy&#x2F;</a>). So if they can do you a favor, in their minds, by fixing your whole website instead of just three pages - and if you&#x27;re willing to pay for it - then everybody wins. Right?That&#x27;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&#x27;s business. They understand.On my jobs, I&#x27;m explicit about what I&#x27;m going to do and what I&#x27;m not going to do. If my client needs to scale, I&#x27;m going to talk them through options for caching and horizontal &amp; 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&#x27;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&#x27;re friends. That&#x27;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.

You&#x27;re getting a little beat up here...I&#x27;m not piling on, I am actually interested, because I need to reinforce my skill in this area, do you have any learning to share about how to better assess the character&#x2F;ethics of whom you are selecting?I do appreciate your honest assessment of your project. One of my investors is pushing me to build a team of outsourced workers; it seems suboptimal to me to say the least. I find the clues you share in retrospect to be helpful. Thanks.

&gt;&gt; motivated to do their jobs well.Doing their jobs well for their own boss means getting as much cash from you as possible.

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&#x27;s fine. But if it can be done by blowing off the client and feeding them bullshit, then that&#x27;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&#x27;t know any better.I really respect your philosophy of assuming people are honest. I used to be that way, too. But after working with contractors and consultants and people overall, I think most people will do what they&#x27;re told, while others will actively game the system. I&#x27;ve found that if you&#x27;re tough in the beginning and let them know that you&#x27;re not to be gamed, then you won&#x27;t have any issues. Business is business.In any case, &quot;Isaac&quot; was completely full of shit. He knew exactly what was up. He approved all those hours - especially the dev hours that were spent on nonsense bugs.I know I sound harsh, but I believe everyone can excel if you get past their bullshit and accept only their best.

Have two TinyPilot&#x27;s...Great product, well supported :-)Sorry to hear about the Website redesign issues. Taking into account the initial budget you were targeting for, it looks like a scenario that required Gerry Weinberg, &quot;Orange Juice Test&quot; before anything else.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.intercom.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-orange-juice-test&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.intercom.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-orange-juice-test&#x2F;</a>

Has anyone approached you about an acquisition?  At 50k+ MRR and those margins on hardware you really shouldn&#x27;t be losing money.  Imagine there&#x27;s a small (or big) hardware company with in house employees to do what you&#x27;re outsourcing at a much lower cost.

I agree with you. I have written plenty of contracts and statements of work, and it&#x27;s so important to get those right and make sure there&#x27;s a true meeting of the minds and that they strike the right prject-specific balance between detail and flexibility, but there&#x27;s no substitute for both sides being a little bit reasonable.It&#x27;s just not a business where a project can succeed despite an adversarial partner. Both sides need to grow together.

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&#x27;re motivated to do their jobs well. I&#x27;m paying for their time, and I assume they&#x27;ll use their time effectively. If they can&#x27;t use their time effectively, I terminate the hire, but I don&#x27;t try to fix it with different policies.I agree that there are payment schemes that will cause even honest people to do poor work (e.g., if I paid someone per kLOC, they&#x27;d probably write more bloated code), but in general, I&#x27;m not worried about someone deliberately sandbagging a job if I&#x27;m paying them by the hour.Paying by the hour is not perfect, but no payment scheme is. With milestone-based billing, you get into disputes about what is or isn&#x27;t in scope, and I don&#x27;t want to waste time on that. It also incentivizes delivering the minimum quality work to meet the milestone and move on rather than focusing on high quality.

&gt; why do that with an agency you&#x27;ve never worked with before?I don’t see how this works? You ask agency for a developer for your project, you get a developer for the project. Will you just withold payment if they don’t use developers you like?

&gt; Tip: Do not take the developers they give you&#x2F;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&#x27;t just hire someone random HR throws your way, why do that with an agency you&#x27;ve never worked with before?

Heck no building a house or renovating anything is always way more expensive than the initial offered price. Hence the rate for fixed price building of houses is so much more than regular pricing. Somehow build always take way longer and so many if not all contractors leave problematic results.

&gt; for the most part, when somebody hires somebody else to build a house, they get a house and it costs mostly what they were quoted up front and takes mostly as long as they were told it was going to take.! Every single time I&#x27;ve hired a general-- I&#x27;ve had to fight scope creep; fight to get them to actually complete work; fight to get the actual quoted materials; fight to fix problematic subcontractor work; fight to avoid price increases.You can get close to original scope and original pricing, but for me it&#x27;s always involved the implied threat of litigation. Note this is the only sector of business life where I&#x27;ve had to be this confrontational.(Work with individual trades has been not bad at all, but this has tended to be tightly scoped projects with relatively simple dependencies).&gt; software project was accurately quoted in advance are relatively trivial projects.Even simple software projects tend to have much deeper interdependencies between work items, and bigger nonlinear combination of work impacts, than other domains. If someone changes something small on the fly in a normal construction project, and a pipe is in a slightly different place-- it&#x27;s usually no big deal. It may involve a little bit of rework.

&gt; they have very different goals than you haveI&#x27;ve been seeing stories like this about out of control software projects as long as I&#x27;ve been working as a developer (so since about 1992). The conclusion is always that the root cause is either malice or incompetence - but it&#x27;s awfully suspicious that software is conspicuously alone in attracting this much incompetent malice. Of course, we hear stories like this about general contractors, but they&#x27;re the exception rather than the rule - for the most part, when somebody hires somebody else to build a house, they get a house and it costs mostly what they were quoted up front and takes mostly as long as they were told it was going to take.While I guess nobody would take time to write about a software project that went exactly as predicted, my experience is that those are the exception rather than the rule, and the cases where a software project was accurately quoted in advance are relatively trivial projects.I can understand why the people who are writing the checks want software projects to be predictable, but in 30 years of practice, I&#x27;ve never figured out a way to accurately predict them, nor have I met anybody else who could. I&#x27;ve met a lot of people who accuse me (and software developers in general) of malicious incompetence for not being able to foretell projects in advance, I have yet to meet one who rolls up their sleeves and says, &quot;here, let me show you how to estimate this stuff accurately&quot; except in very abstract terms like &quot;first write down every task you&#x27;re going to do, then write down how long each task is going to take, and then add up those numbers and voila! Estimate complete!&quot;

&gt;The agency is not your buddyI was a consultant for a while and this is true. We usually had one or two empty suits per project that survived by getting buddy buddy with the clients. It was kind of a symbiotic relationship with the superstar devs. The superstars did nearly all the work and the buddy buddy devs helped keep the clients happy. But ultimately you&#x27;re paying a lot of money for someone to be your buddy.

outsourcing is usually done so leadership has somebody to blame if their idea fails. Same reason companies like McKinsey exist, usually some exec just uses them as the way to actually implement what they want without directly fighting via internal company politics. If it succeeds, they take credit. If it fails, blame the contractors&#x2F;consultants

And what is the solution? Essentially at the end of the day you want to design: effective labour as service. If only it was this simple we would have it already. Not saying you should not put important clauses into contract to perhaps later have some backing in court, but...Essentially, I think it&#x27;s good to not treat business parties as friends. However, I would put a lot of attention into this relationship to increase common&#x2F;shared understanding. For as long as we think we have common understanding and somehow at the end of the day I makes me very unhappy -&gt; I might give it a one more try and do another session of explaining, but finally I will just switch if it happens to often.

Good consulting companies that are able to think long term realize that good employees doing good work, getting good reviews, and getting recommendations are the key to a sustainable business. Getting fired is expensive. A consultancy that checks all those boxes is going to be expensive though. Maybe more expensive than just hiring your own.

Speaking loosely, I would say that there are two kinds of people: those that optimize within a framework of rules and those that optimize the framework so they can relax inside it.My experience is a lot of web agency people are the second kind. They have a cozy business where a happy client is worth more than a bilked one. They can be (occasionally) generous on the margins because the overall structure is good for them.I would never look at someone coming to me with a $7k contract thinking &quot;maybe I could stretch this out to several months and $40k.&quot; It&#x27;s not worth the heart burn. I&#x27;ve only ever seen that scenario when a client couldn&#x27;t be talked out of scope creep.Unfortunately this agency was the other type. They&#x27;re bad for the whole industry because trust is such an important factor and it&#x27;s a challenge for clients to know who is happy to make a bunch of money for an honest hour&#x27;s work versus who wants to cheat the already generous system.

&gt; For example: I see hourly billing, and bug fixing counting as billed hours. How has the agency an incentive to keep bugs low if it makes them more money?More importantly, why is a bug on code they haven&#x27;t even delivered yet considered your responsibility. This is not billable hours, this should be included in the original feature hours. If he were requesting a new feature and calling that a bug, sure. But it sounds like they were the one&#x27;s introducing new features against his protests.Slightly tangentially, this is why I refuse to do work with companies that strictly bill hourly. Give me a project estimate with strictly defined scope. Split the deliverables up into three-five milestones (so either party can cut and run if things are not going to plan) with partial payments on milestone completion. Hourly billing comes after for support contracts and supplementals.

With how templates, design, and code work on the Internet now looking at a portfolio does little to reassure people of capability.I run a web design company myself, and the best customers to work with are ones that are decisive rather than needing to be sold an idea for design. Also great are customers that realize that design can be changed later or that precedent in functionality, message, and content rank foremost above site design.With any web dev project it&#x27;s best to plan what can be done in short phases rather than in huge project launches. We learned from the chaos in Healthcare.Gov (not our project of course) that huge product launches overwhelm teams, face huge delays, and also can result in chaotic deployments.Great leaders that are decisive, studious, considerate, accountable, and calculatedly adventurous are the best customers and I enjoy working with them, also written agreements&#x2F;contracts are essential to being on time and on budget.In &quot;WebAgency&#x27;s&quot; defense though, their illustrations do better depict the use of your product, despite perhaps the images not being very flattering.One of the biggest hurdles to overcome on our end as a web design company is marketing, as compared to other companies (larger agencies that do web design). They spend a lot on marketing, and thus that is what makes them even more expensive to hire. These large companies also retain developers and split them across projects, so accountability and focus are at times not as good as what a dedicated development team and project manager could provide.The #1 tell for the risk involved in dealing with a design project is the complexity of the proposed solution. It doesn&#x27;t not seem that this project was meant to be that complex.... I was shocked by the $45k price tag. It&#x27;s at least a good thing that I guess the company looks quite profitable.I might be charging my customers way too little on the other hand though... :P

I’m dealing with this right now where it’s clear one of the engineers is burned out and needs to be cycled off the project for awhile.

I have seen many outsourcing projects with my coachees and with founders, I&#x27;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 the incentives of the agency as much with yours as possible. For example: I see hourly billing, and bug fixing counting as billed hours. How has the agency an incentive to keep bugs low if it makes them more money? Agency has low retention, new people are slower, slower means more money for the agency. How has the agency an incentive to keep people on the project?[Edit] You might think this is obvious, but I have seen unaligned incentives in mostly every outsourcing project I&#x27;ve looked into and was asked to fix. Tip: Do not take the developers they give you&#x2F;have on the project. Interview all of them and reject the bad ones. As a new customer, they will not give you the best but those available (currently not on project&#x2F;rejected by other clients)

The only thing that really sticks out as improved is the logo. branding is everything. maybe that new logo is worth the $46K it took to get there.

First mistake in my eyes is hiring from an Internet forum instead of a professional service.Granted, I don’t have a personal website and nor have I hired a website freelancer. So, heap on the salt.Sorry that you went through all this. I can tell how frustrating it was and it doesn’t feel good to be scammed. It’s generous of you to share your experience like this and maybe educate someone who might’ve been getting ready to make a similar error.

I don&#x27;t know where you got the idea that this agency has any experience in design conversions or building funnels, but I won&#x27;t dismiss your comment entirely.From a design standpoint, my biggest gripe is with the first two sections on the landing page design. I mean, it quite literally looks like either the site is reselling (drop-shipping) or it&#x27;s a knockoff scam. At no point did I get the impression of &quot;brand identity&quot; or &quot;this product looks trustworthy&quot;.Which means that the primarily source of sales for this product is word of mouth (reputation), and to be fair I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if this agency just realized that themselves and exploited the whole idea.If reputation is how you get sales, then why give a shit about building a brandable design. A design that actually converts and is possible to measure in long-term.

Except the name of the game for agencies is to book a big expensive project and farm it out to entry level employees (dev and designers) with just enough supervision to be better.Then have a fun enough office to try and keep people around in an extremely high turn over industry.It is what almost everyone is doing unfortunately who gets big enough to carry a team.The best designers and developers also don&#x27;t tend to want to do contract work like this.

&gt; I can pay a guy $60&#x2F;hr in IndiaMan, you’re really overpaying if you think an Indian designer would be $60&#x2F;hr.That would be more than the annual salary of a senior FAANG engineer.

Based on the sales graph, it sounds like they didn&#x27;t even accomplish that much.

In my opinion, you&#x27;re not paying $175 for a good looking page.  You&#x27;re paying that premium for an expertise in what will convert, how to build a funnel, and what to measure.  I can pay a guy $60&#x2F;hr in India, and get something that looks decent.

fartingwizard[at]hhhhhsssshssss[dot]devI primarily code in Python so that&#x27;s why the weird domain name.

Well he had a 32% increase (vs. the previous month) in June [1]. I&#x27;m not sure how the increase was calculated but I don&#x27;t think see how you can attribute 40% to the redesign - the graph is already up and to the right ;)[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mtlynch.io&#x2F;retrospectives&#x2F;2022&#x2F;07&#x2F;#tinypilothttpstinypilotkvmcomrefmtlynchio-stats" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mtlynch.io&#x2F;retrospectives&#x2F;2022&#x2F;07&#x2F;#tinypilothttpstin...</a>

He says he got a 40% increase in sales, so I imagine that takes the edge off a little LOL!

Here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tailwindui.com&#x2F;templates" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tailwindui.com&#x2F;templates</a>

&gt; I am pretty sure there are a handful of good (based on Tailwind CSS) template generators which will produce results superior to the pages you received.Where are they?

I am pretty sure there are a handful of good (based on Tailwind CSS) template generators which will produce results superior to the pages you received.Sure, you&#x27;d need to hire someone to do the logo and the custom icons, but I am certain that would not cost you anywhere near $46k.Furthermore, I cannot comprehend how this actually happened even if you shared all the details. Holy shit, for $46k you could have gotten the spaceship-equivalent of a design from someone who actually loves what they are doing.Mate, $46k is annual salary for A LOT of people. In the amount of months that it took for them to &quot;finish&quot; the project, a junior dev could have picked up design chops and done a 10x better job at this.Just wow....ALSO A QUICK EDIT:If anyone needs design work done (best I can do is a checkout page with a bunch of unstyled ordered lists) my pricing starts at $40k per 8 months, which is a lot less for what the author&#x27;s company was charging him.

I don&#x27;t think this is universally true. Developers (myself included) often just do what they want regardless of what they&#x27;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.

And &quot;I&#x27;ve got a lot of my plate but let me see if I can squeeze you in&quot; is one of the most obvious ploy of salespeople.

&gt; I don’t feel like they meant to deceive me or squeeze money out of me.From the article:
&gt; 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.

This is a very good point, sadly :( A lot of mediocre companies will abuse the legal system to cover up their ineptitude.

&gt; It&#x27;s odd that you didn&#x27;t want to name the agency.I&#x27;ve learned to keep things vague. I&#x27;m even careful about writing complimentary stuff; usually, if I have had a hand in it, I generally try to avoid directly naming.I am very careful about writing non-complimentary stuff; even if I have documented proof. In these cases, I may keep it to direct personal experience, and avoid directly naming the guilty parties. I&#x27;ve found that people don&#x27;t heed warnings, so I&#x27;m not actually doing anyone a favor.Lawyers in the US can get awful indiscriminate, when it comes to dragging people into court, and I have found that most organizations have many teams; not all of which may be bad&#x2F;good.

1000% agree. A lot of web dev is insanely overpriced. Find a good cheap template and save tens of thousands. I guarantee you an agency will not be 100x better than for the 100x price difference. Web is one of those &quot;make once, use often&quot; industries that we don&#x27;t really know how to price yet, but $175&#x2F;hr is definitely not right.Agencies aren&#x27;t selling you superior talent. They&#x27;re preying on your ignorance. Most of the best web stuff is free, made by people who are either passionate about their craft and want to give it away, or else have to prove the value of their labor because they were born in a poorer country and merit is all they have to prove themselves with. When you work with an agency, all it means is that you&#x27;re too scared (or don&#x27;t know how) to vet design and dev work accurately, so you&#x27;re paying extra for the illusion of quality. Trust me, you&#x27;re not going to get that. You&#x27;re just ripping yourself off.

They&#x27;re meant to be serving him. Instead, he was serving them, propping up their sizeable enterprise at the expense of his own (solo with meagre profits ~$20k&#x2F;y).The boost in sales since could&#x27;ve been achieved with a modest revamp or be entirely unrelated.I don&#x27;t think anyone at his scale should be paying $175&#x2F;hr for custom illustrations especially when they look like the placeholder illustrations used in every startup template these days. For something specific like illustration, don&#x27;t trust a random hire from the agency - go via UpWork or similar and find a freelancer whose portfolio you can vet in advance.He should&#x27;ve used a well-designed Shopify theme for $300 and instead put money towards product photography. That&#x27;d get it 90% of the way comfortably and he&#x27;d have $40k+ still in his account. (I say this as a 20+ year web designer whose career has been eaten by platforms and templates.)

It&#x27;s odd that you didn&#x27;t want to name the agency. They ripped you off =&#x2F; No two ways about it.&gt; 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-doormatting, perspective on the issue. This was an incompetently managed agency who kept bullying you because you let them. At $175&#x2F;hr, even as their smallest client, you deserved waaaaaaaaay more professionalism. IMHO the biggest lesson to be learned here, that you didn&#x27;t really talk about in the blog post, is not to let someone -- agency or employer or freelancer or otherwise -- fleece you over like this. Isaac kept stalling and not delivering and mis-spending your contracted funds. You should&#x27;ve demanded a partial refund or threatened to sue. Their behavior wasn&#x27;t acceptable, but you just kept saying &quot;it&#x27;ll get better...&quot;. It never does.Sorry to be so harsh, but you kept trying to defend their &quot;best intentions&quot;. No, they just didn&#x27;t take you seriously, and then they failed your project and dragged you down with them. Nobody should be paying for an agency like that, especially for $175&#x2F;hr. What a rip-off :(You did mention that you probably would&#x27;ve seen better results from a freelancer, and that&#x27;s probably true -- especially from a place with some bare accountability, like Upwork where there&#x27;s reviews.

Stories like this make me think I should get back into freelancing.I&#x27;m pretty such I could have had the whole project finished within a couple of weeks for around $5k

Agree. Fast is good, but content is better.If you can give me super content medium fast, I&#x27;ll take that over medium content super fast. It&#x27;s really only at the extremes do things start to differ (ie shit content or snails pace slow &amp; glitchy).Of course, the ideal setup is super content super fast, which is why Craigslist is probably never going to do a major rebrand. They already have plenty of startups constantly nipping at their heels, so they may as well maintain the super fast advantage they have over them to cement their status. Their only real threat would be a super speedy, super pretty, site that somehow launches full of good content.

We&#x27;re talking about the site design. The stuff actually in the site is a separate issue. Most redesigns afaict make the site slower, which is the wrong direction. The content presumably stays the same either way.Case in point: plenty of HN readers click on the comment thread but not TFA. I believe that a lot of the time, that&#x27;s due to dread of some godawful slow loading page contaminating their browser with tracking cooties and who knows what.

&gt; Craigslist still thrives despite having no features and looking prehistoric, because it&#x27;s so fast. Google.com homepage looks almost empty.Craigslist and Google&#x27;s site speed enhances their success, it isn&#x27;t the cause of their success. Their content is what the user wants. Giving it to them fast is a huge bonus.I don&#x27;t want to see shit fast. I want to see good stuff fast. If I have to, I&#x27;ll wait to see really good stuff.&gt; Meanwhile the also-rans with busy pages (remember Yahoo leading the search space? Digg leading link aggregation?) are now near forgotten.Yet Amazon, with an incredibly busy page thrives. Because the content is what matters.

I think Facebook Marketplace is thriving but mainly because it inserts itself into people&#x27;s other behavior, maybe not because people think it&#x27;s the best platform for exchanging goods. In fact, it could really use some of the moderation features of Craigslist.After much creative destruction, we&#x27;re back to inserting classified ads next to the stuff people are reading to pass the time.

I wouldn&#x27;t call Craigslist &quot;thriving&quot;, it&#x27;s still alive but it seems like Facebook Marketplace took over a lot of what it did.

We know the redesign _preceded_ an increase in sales. More info is needed to know how&#x2F;whether it actually led to sales.

&gt; to realize that your redesign didn&#x27;t helpDid you miss the part where it led to a very large increase in sales?

I can&#x27;t remember seeing a website redesign in my entire life that didn&#x27;t make the site worse. Many sites have gone down the tubes due to redesigns while always blaming the failure on something else. Kudos for at least having the self-awareness to realize that your redesign didn&#x27;t help.To first order, there&#x27;s (usually) only one site metric that really matters, and that&#x27;s page load speed. Craigslist still thrives despite having no features and looking prehistoric, because it&#x27;s so fast. Google.com homepage looks almost empty. Meanwhile the also-rans with busy pages (remember Yahoo leading the search space? Digg leading link aggregation?) are now near forgotten.

Honestly it looks awesome. Your previous also looked awesome, but I deed looked dated. Now you have copied the style of Digital Ocean, which is fine.

I think the sad thing is the contrary to some people&#x27;s opinions, this is not limited to small &quot;cowboy&quot; companies, it can happen from the smallest to the biggest and it is a mixture of competence, management, desire for profits etc. as it is in most companies.The biggest difficulty is that you are paying a premium for intangibles when you talk designs and branding. If you absolutely know that your current brand is useless then anything is better than nothing but also you probably don&#x27;t have to do very much to get better before the returns are diminishing.Otherwise for design work, although the result might look &quot;OK&quot;, it is hard to see how they would justify the money, although of course they will just like Tropicana justified their failed redesign.I would normally say that you have to know enough about something to pay somebody else to do it well but here the OP does seem to know roughly what is going on so it might just come back to a more formal kick-off process and not getting caught up in the excitement that you just start and worry about it later. Clearly this company could have done a good job so it is not about ability, just management and scoping it properly.

If you hired a mechanic to regas your car&#x27;s AC, and they give the car back with a full realignment, detailing, etc, all at prices you wouldn&#x27;t have ever paid in the first place, you would be driving away without even thinking of paying, probably to the nearest ombudsman or law firm.but at least that mechanic probably would have done the re-gassing first.

The difference in size between companies imply different operation trajectories.  If you are their smallest customer, you are bound to be deprioritized and treated as second-class.  If you are their biggest customer, you may well destroy them with procurement and governance processes.

The agency shouldn&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t ride herd on their designers. Considering they were working outside of the SoW, those were disputable invoices, but that&#x27;s cold comfort when you don&#x27;t have the free cash flow to take this to legal.

Well they know they&#x27;ve done an awful job, you know it too, but they happily kept the $45K. If they were as honest as you say, they would have refunded some of it.

Thanks for reading!Yeah, I don&#x27;t think the agency is blameless here, but I also don&#x27;t think they&#x27;re malicious or dishonest. I think they just overestimated their ability to scale down their workflows to a project smaller than their typical gig.

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 &quot;did their best&quot;, 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&#x2F;transparency&#x2F;team of experts is what you are paying for! You&#x27;re paying for accountability! There really are good agencies out there that care about their customers and bend over backwards to deliver what they promise, but they are hard to find. For the size project you were looking at though, I do agree that a freelancer could have been a better option, but you&#x27;ll run into some of the same challenges. Finding good freelancers can be just as hard as finding a good agency.

It really gets you 95% there.Like try to explain to a non technical person how to deploy a website on AWS with a real domain.Zryo is actually cheaper than Wix if you just need to put up a static site. Yeah I can do it for free on S3, but it&#x27;s easy to design my Zryo site and it looks nice.

Yeah then people wonder why people prefer going with Wix&#x2F;Squarespace etcThat&#x27;s why. It also tones the &quot;customer nitpicking every detail&quot; way way down, when you can only pick from set choices.

&gt;
Why didn’t you just use a Shopify template? 
If I could go back to when I first created the website, I would have made it a simple Shopify store with a custom theme.That&#x27;s the biggest take away here. Unless you have a unique need, use an off the shelf solution.

And the small company will hire a single contractor for 1&#x2F;4 of what they&#x27;re getting, and that&#x27;s who will do all the work.

No we did it almost all in-house. It&#x27;s a pretty competitive space, there&#x27;s like 20 A-list agencies that operate at that level and 100 others a notch or two below. We frequently ended up working on site with clients, we couldn&#x27;t hide anything.

And that big, fancy agency will outsource the whole project for 1&#x2F;20 of the paying price to a small company.

Probably the opposite actually. The first victims of a recession will be consultants. The agency in question is probably used to much bigger clients, but was willing to do something much smaller because the sales pipeline dried up. And then they brought a heavyweight approach to a tiny project and failed.The heavyweight approach is absolutely mandatory when dealing with larger corporate clients or when you&#x27;re trying to really bring something unique. You may be surprised who hires agencies for this kind of stuff, because past agencies had keystone accounts worth millions per year from giant tech companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google. They don&#x27;t ask to put a template on WooCommerce, they ask how to find, engage and retain new customers and differentiate themselves from everyone else.

Another sign that we are in tech bubble. The guy was asking for the redesign of 3 pages + a logo. Landing page, shopping cart and checkout for one (!) product he sells. This is such a standard, run off the mill application why wouldn&#x27;t a decent agency have something ready in their drawer where they just have to adjust the CSS to make it look unique. How isn&#x27;t this process completely tried and figured out after 30+ years of ecommerce?&gt; Agencies I worked for in the past wouldn&#x27;t pick up the phone for less than $500kThese times are way overdue to end and it seems like they are ...

Man, you get what you pay for. If you actually want a thoughtful design based on user needs and strategic goals with an actual rise in conversion rates, $46k is not even close. I&#x27;ve never seen it done for less than $200k. Agencies I worked for in the past wouldn&#x27;t pick up the phone for less than $500k and we had clients tripping over themselves to hire us.That being said, we did take on smaller clients from time to time just for portfolio or on the prospect of a &quot;foot in the door&quot; for a bigger account and we actually struggled mightily to scale down. We were used to large teams of dedicated specialists and didn&#x27;t have geneslists who could wear all the hats at once. I&#x27;m wondering if this agency had the same problem.

But these kinds of mistakes can kill an early stage startup.

&quot;Managed $XX,XXX site redesign that resulted in [cherry-picked numbers to make it look like it improved things when it didn&#x27;t at all]&quot; looks good on a résumé.Your managers may not understand much, but they can understand (by which I mean get a thrill out of looking at) before-and-after screenshots on a powerpoint, which may matter when promotions are available.That&#x27;s at least as true in bigco as in startups and small companies.

&gt; We are an early stage startupIt&#x27;s no different at massive corporate behemoths.

I think that&#x27;s pretty backwards. Non-agile is how you get these things being rebuilt every other year because by the time it&#x27;s built the requirements that were originally gathered are obsolete.

A tale as old as (Internet) time - I&#x27;ve seen this cycle happen, too.Tangentially, I have to wonder to what extent misapplication of Agile, and similar, project management processes is to blame.You&#x27;d think for most relatively simple sites, like we&#x27;re talking about here, it ought to be planned once and built once, but something about the mindset that the goal posts can be moved during planning and development seems to drag everything out at length.

Ideally, who should decide what the public face of the company should be if not for marketing?

&gt; - Marketing team decides they want a new site.That&#x27;s your problem right there. And the fact that their decision is the company&#x27;s decision.

Wow this one is spot on. Had exactly the same experience as a contract PM working with Marketeers who lived in fairy-land.Two hilarious moments:
1. A big fuss was made of a launch of a new site, marketeers demanded that we had plenty of extra servers for the demand. On launch day I had the live stats of visitors and it occasionally flickered to above 0.
2. We finally needed to refactor and do some maintenance to the duct-taped code that had resulted in years of &#x27;everything is urgent&#x27; &#x27;one extra feature by tomorrow`. When I told the Head of Marketing they were doing this vital work, she couldn&#x27;t understand that because no new graphics or UI were being produced that they were doing actual work - &quot;But I can&#x27;t see any new work&quot;It was not worth the small fortune in daily rates they were paying me

I live through this every 2 years:- Marketing team decides they want a new site.- I tell them when&#x2F;how we can schedule it.- They decide they want to go outside so it can get done &quot;quicker&quot; by &quot;professionals.&quot;- It costs 5-10x what it would in house, the product is harder to work with, using some WordPress plugins no one has ever heard of, it&#x27;s not responsive on mobile nor usable on our demographic&#x27;s primary resolution.- It takes 6-10 months of &quot;clean up&quot; to make the site usable.- Web traffic, shockingly, has remained completely constant even after spending half of our annual marketing budget on a web site.- My team is brought in when the agency becomes too slow because the entire team over there has turned over since the project inception.- We eventually migrate everything over to squarespace or weebly or similar so that the marketing team can just edit things on their own.- Every lesson above is forgotten in the ensuing 12-18 months.We are an early stage startup. We&#x27;ve burned through almost 20% of the revenue we&#x27;ve ever brought in on this cycle. Thankfully, finally, we&#x27;ve grown enough to bring on a marketing manager who will I hope put an end to this madness.

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

Is answering email at least this week exceptional? What learning curve a small business accountant has even? It’s not a factory with amortizing equipment, worker schedules, rolling production and distribution of expenses. I work with accountants all my life, and for small businesses it’s a matter of loading contracts, bank statements, invoices and salaries into an app, sorting expenses by legal category and that’s it. There is nothing to learn in a small business accounting, it is entry-level for this job title.

As someone who have been on both sides of the table I can completely resonate with your statements. But I think that there is an expectation by small business owners that every expert will completely understand their business and will deliver exceptional results from day 1. So I think there should be some learning curve with very clear results expected on each and every step.

Depends on how much work you are having done. On a remodel you need a GC unless you have a lot of time and expertise to hire all the trades and such yourself. They really do provide value.

I&#x27;ve used marketplace apps for home services, and just as airbnb, the results were often stellar and always at least pretty good.

If it’s anything like the market for home services, the middleman service will be even worse than dealing with vendors directly: a middleman adding a layer of indirection but little value.

Is this an example of the Market for Lemons? If I hire a developer I have a pretty good idea what to look for (and to a lesser degree, a designer, as I have worked with enough designers to know how the good ones work). But I would have no idea what makes for a good accountant or corporate lawyer or plumber, so would need to depend on referrals and a certain amount of blind trust.

I am building this for M&amp;A and investor due diligence. DueDilio is an online managed marketplace focused on due diligence. We connect business buyers, sellers, intermediaries, and private investors with pre-vetted due diligence service providers. Our large and growing network of verified independent professionals, boutique, and mid-size firms specialize in finance, legal, technology, commercial, and other key areas of business diligence.We&#x27;ve connected clients with accountants previously with good results.Our website is www.duedilio.com

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.angi.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.angi.com&#x2F;</a>

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 accountant to help me handle some business growth. It was a person from a well regarded local firm, initial meetings were good, and then they proceeded to deliver none of the agreed-upon work, take 2-3 weeks to respond to emails (multiple times, I had to call their office and schedule an in-person meeting just to get a response), and then de-prioritize my business relative to other clients so badly that I wasn’t able to submit my taxes until June.If anyone can successfully build a service that lets me reliably pick professional-services providers with the same level of confidence that I pick an AirBnb (not 100%, but pretty good, with an expectation for reasonable mediation and fallback coverage if the offering is radically different than what’s described), I would happily pay a 20% premium on those services versus the existing “ask friends for referrals and cross your fingers” status quo.

It&#x27;s really not that simple IMO.If you look at the earlier mockups, they were just as good if not better. I also think they chose the wrong logo from the earlier mocks.If you are smaller team&#x2F;org&#x2F;business, I&#x27;d highly recommend just move as quickly as possible with the agency. Less opportunity for scope creep from them and let the creatives rock and roll. They will, without a doubt, want the project done as fast as possible. They will also produce the same work in 1 vs vs 2 vs vs 3 months.If you are bigger team&#x2F;org&#x2F;business, usually you are buying the &quot;process&quot; or &quot;experience&quot;. So it&#x27;s all mute and a team thing.If you are looking for both, you&#x27;ll fail like they did here.

Having worked for an ad agency (and for a consulting firm) AVOID THEM UNLESS YOU ARE A LARGE ORGANIZATION WITH A BIG BUDGET.They are not going to watch costs for you. They are not going to have their &quot;best people on it&quot; (unless, maybe, you are their biggest client). And everyone working on the project is looking to get their billable hours in. The entire motivation of the organization is to bill as many hours as they think the customer can pay for.I met a lot of great people in those companies, but I do not miss my time working in them.

You pretty much nailed it. Also can’t really hire a US based agency with US salaries and expect a rebrand to be cheap. OP also went though a ton of design rounds which is just throwing money away. It should have been capped in the contract to something much lower, like one or two designs.

I&#x27;ve worked at an agency my entire career (nine years so far)Looks like there was poor project management and internal communication on their part, at the minimum their time tracking reports for tiny projects like yourself should be automated.For small projects like this, we would keep the team to a minimum (lets say one PM, dev, and designer) and the web work wouldn&#x27;t be started until everything design wise was completed (we do branding first before touching any UI type stuff to make sure the UI is on the same train of thought).But yea, I wouldn&#x27;t recommend hiring an agency unless you want to be hands off or having x amount of budget

It looks like this project happened at the early days of COVID.There could be dozens of reasons for the ways this played out on the agency side of things.You could very well have kicked this off a year earlier or a year later and gotten different results.

Is it just me who finds the old website design much better than the redesign? The new redesigned website seems to lack character that the old website had.

the white and green (button) --- does that meet a11y contrast guidelines?I would say for a b2b company design probably doesn&#x27;t matter too much. I think minor things like font choice probably affect a consumer discretionary brand much more than you...

Can anyone give an anecdote about how costly (time and money) it is to pursue legal options in this kind of situation? I hate net-negative strategies, but (anec)data would be really helpful to many of us in the future.

The decision to anonymize the agency is understandable, but I wonder about the systemic effects. Right now the reputation cost is born by all agencies, leading to a tragedy of the commons for shoddy delivery.But encouraging authors to name names would drag them into a public dispute they don’t need, and disincentivize the many valuable lessons that are in here. (THANK YOU! 90% of people wouldn’t have pushed through the discomfort to share their learning).What is a system of public discourse that threads that needle? I’m sure “Isaac” feels a little bad, but has ”don’t pitch clients we can’t service” shot to the top of his priority list? But again, I don’t want to put more onus on the author who’s already gifted me a lot of hard earned knowledge.

&gt;I’m not trying to bash the agency hereHe should be trying to do so.

On the whole I agree with you.That said, margins on this kind of hardware product aren&#x27;t great. The author has shared them before. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mtlynch.io&#x2F;solo-developer-year-3&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mtlynch.io&#x2F;solo-developer-year-3&#x2F;</a>

It&#x27;s not at all guaranteed that increase in sales was due to the redesign.But yeah considering that revenues have only gone up, might as well just call it a cost of doing business. Learn from it and move on. (It sounds like this is exactly what he&#x27;s doing.)

But imagine how much further he would be ahead if they came in at time and on budget. He arguably lost half a year of positive benefits because they dragged their feet for so long.Things can be positive and cost-effective, too.

Don’t feel bad. The end result was positive. Sales increased enough that the cost will be made up in a few months.  Person actually made out well considering the effect of the work.

As someone who has worked at a content agency for a decade, let me just say: I feel really bad that this happened to you, and that scope creep is real.I almost feel like you needed to ask for three separate things: A brand identity, a marketing strategy refresh, and then (finally) a website redesign. That all three were combined into one process likely caused this problem to drag on. The agency had its problems, but to be honest to me as someone who is familiar with this space, it sounds like they were combining a lot of disciplines into one project without considering that it would have been better to chew smaller bites.There are times where you do need to bend the rules. At the beginning of the pandemic I sort of broke protocol to get a COVID-19 landing page on a client’s site online because I knew that it would take weeks done the normal way and possibly would have led us to charge the client for something that a skilled designer only needed a couple of hours to build in WordPress. While the landing page wasn’t perfect, it held up for nearly a year, and showed that we were taking things seriously at a time we needed to. A lot of agencies aren’t wired for doing right beyond billable hours, so be mindful of the risks.Either way, I feel bad that you paid so much for a site that looks way better but doesn’t feel like $46k worth of work.

<pre><code> A few weeks later, WebAgency called a meeting to share updates, but they hadn’t made any progress on the logo or branding. Instead, they spent the whole meeting showing me design ideas for the website.
 
 “To be clear, the project is still a rebranding and not a redesign, right?” I asked.
</code></pre>
I&#x27;m sure the quote isn&#x27;t verbatim from your meeting with, but I&#x27;m guessing your tone with them was similar. It sounds like you were speaking to them like you&#x27;re both working at the same company, for the same boss, which isn&#x27;t the right tone, IMO.You hired these people, so you should really be talking to them like you&#x27;re the boss. Basically, dictate where their work is going. If it sounds like they&#x27;re going off-track, that&#x27;s your money they&#x27;re wasting, so tell them, &quot;This doesn&#x27;t look like what I asked for.

40% increase in sales is phenomenal. If that’s down to the redesign and not because of existing trends then it was money well spent

Wow yeah I missed this. Read through most if it and was looking to see if anyone else had already commented my thinking:“And the new design is WAY worse in every way!”Honestly it’s hard to tell what it even is with the new design: SaaS product? Contract agency? Flight tracker?I found the first design to be significantly clearer. I wonder how the author distinguished between revenue increase coming from natural growth vs. the redesign.

Yeah I&#x27;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 &quot;service normally reserved for large companies despite my limited budget&quot;.

&quot;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%.&quot;Should have put this in the beginning of the article.As for all the issues mentioned in the article, trust me on this, it&#x27;s always like this. I&#x27;ve been that &quot;small client&quot; hiring externals at all tiers: mechanical turk, freelancers, agencies.You ask for A but get B. You agree on a timeline but none are respected. You can put your foot down but that does absolutely nothing, they don&#x27;t need you. You&#x27;re more like a hobby on the side.

We used a design agency as well for one of our product logos. Come to find out, they just ripped off the Noun Project svgs, added some color, and called it a day. A lot of the agencies I’ve seen typically have enough templates already so it’s to the point now that you just fill in some blanks, choose a color palette, add relevant graphics and you’re done.

Thanks for reading!&gt;This looks like a great product at a great price point, with solid sales, how are you not in the black yet?!In short: the chip shortage.The biggest expense right now is hardware engineering. We couldn&#x27;t continue manufacturing our PCB because one of the components sold out, so we had to redesign with different components. That&#x27;s been expensive (about $60k so far).And then to avoid redesigning further, I&#x27;ve had to stockpile components for 6-24 months, so a lot of money is tied up in inventory.The redesign work is wrapping up, though, so I&#x27;m hoping to have significantly lower expenses in the second half of the year.

Unrelated to the website discussion, the last link showing it is still negative profits after spectacular revenue increases is scary. This looks like a great product at a great price point, with solid sales, how are you not in the black yet?!

so the question is, is it really that hard to start from scratch?You could have the top tier upwork freelancers for 60-100 USD per hourfully dedicated to your projectWould it really be more expensive than a spaghetti touched by 10+ people at an agency?

Poor taste is stringing along your client and fleecing them for every penny.That said, I&#x27;m not convinced this is the company.

I didn&#x27;t &quot;attempt to find&quot; them. I was considering working with this agency and the designs are eerily similar.

The author chose not to name them.Attempting to find that information and then publicly sharing it feels in poor taste, regardless of your opinion of how things went.

You would be wrong. Enough clues were left.
Look at the retrospective blog posts - OP started work with design agency in October 2021. So look at September 2021 &#x27;freelancer&#x2F;seeking freelancer&#x27; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28380660" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28380660</a>)search throw using unusual words from blog post. read likely posts. stop for some air. click through website of likely candidate. hold breath. check CEOs name. not the same but...Elementary my dear Watson. Ele-flipping-mentary.CEO takes the time to post in freelancer thread. They can write a comment to give us their side and hopefully announce the full return of all monies to OP.Because the popularity of this post is soaring like a plane or weather balloon.

I think I found them, might be heartbeat[link redacted]

This is what reliably happens if you give one person project to a team. Seen this multiple times internally.

I respect the tone of this blog post. I pause to think how I would word this experience if it happened to me. Since it hasn&#x27;t, I don&#x27;t really know how I would react. However; having this cool composure to think through why things ended up as they did and how it could be improved in the future is something I hope to aspire to.&quot;We just didn&#x27;t fit&quot; is a fantastic conclusion.The ego is one helluva thing, and a hurt ego with negative self talk can lead one down silly paths. OP is cool as a cucumber.

I&#x27;ve worked on the other side of this and it&#x27;s the end result of any large agency that starts chasing the bigger clients. More and more time, effort, and money is spent on the ideation&#x2F;thinking&#x2F;design side to the point everything else just grinds to a halt. For executives on both sides it&#x27;s great. For anyone who hasn&#x27;t to _do_ something, it&#x27;s at best pointless, and at worst poisonous to every other activity.As the author said, hiring a freelancer with specific goals is a much better route.

They kind of addressed this by saying that they try to keep management billing hours quite low. Perhaps this low percentage would have been &quot;enough&quot; had the size of the project been bigger? Although, I think it&#x27;d be fair to argue that the designers should have been &quot;trained&quot; (i.e., with time not billed as &quot;management&quot; for a client&#x27;s project) to stick to the project scope a bit better.I get it though: my only experience has been with internal, full-time employees, and I see is given a fair amount of latitude to do exciting things and to experience small failures. It&#x27;s a different mindset for external contractors, it seems.

This makes a lot of sense, I feel like this is more of a management issue, it should be the responsibility of the manager to keep everyone working on what is initially planned.

&gt; seem quite even keeled in dealing with everythingI&#x27;m guessing the money they lost in this endeavor didn&#x27;t materially impact them.

Yeah I sort of rolled my eyes at all the logo redesigns (especially as these seem to have come first in the process) but it seems Author was fine with it. It’s an impressive read because Author  (and Isaac to some degree) seem quite even keeled in dealing with everything.

I call this the being too nice mistake. It is like the customer that would watch an employee spit in their food and say thanks to them. Effective leaders do not fear confrontation.

You are right
But it&#x27;s not always a clear cut. Sometimes trades have &quot;artistic integrity&quot; for a lack of better words. Carpenters, architects and also programmers - The client tells them what to do, but they usually want some freedom to leave their mark.

That seems to be the point where sunk cost fallacy strikes hard in the post to me. They had paid $X for &quot;80% of the first milestone of work&quot; and that sunk cost locks them in to everything else that happens. They seemed too fearful from that point onward that if they fired the agency and brought in a new agency or freelancer that they would start from square 1 and do all of the previous work (and spend) over again.The sunk cost fallacy suggests that sometimes is better for you if you should just accept existing losses, accept you&#x27;ve already sunk those costs and won&#x27;t get them back, and move on. I don&#x27;t know what their contract looked like with the agency, but an 80% of a logo design sounds like a perfect deliverable that you can safely fire the existing team and take the 80% deliverable to a new designer, not start from scratch, and ask them to do a final polish step. I would have cut losses there, but of course it is much easier to armchair quarterback from hindsight and different perspectives than if you are in the middle of it fighting that gut feeling that you&#x27;ve already invested so much and can&#x27;t &quot;afford&quot; to cut losses.

You&#x27;re correct, and I expect the real issue is that working that was was completely foreign to WebAgency.They typically are employed by businesses who are looking for a very specific result: a good website that works well.Their team wasn&#x27;t setup to, and didn&#x27;t know how to just deliver a simple logo.The correct answer would have been for WebAgency&#x27;s CEO to say, &quot;We&#x27;d love to work with you, but we&#x27;re not really setup for this type of project. If you&#x27;d like to have us take on your whole website, here&#x27;s what that would look like. Otherwise, I don&#x27;t think we&#x27;re a good fit.&quot;

I think that at the time, the agency upsold the author and they went along with it; after that, sunk cost became a factor. I do believe this is what most agencies will try, upselling I mean.That said, clients can also be problematic; I recall one where the client paid a fixed amount per two-week sprint, but then really started to stretch out how much work was done within that sprint by basically not signing off on tasks and reporting new features to be added as bugs. It&#x27;s another case I think of a party not being firm enough about scope.

If it&#x27;s not part of the agreed upon scope and they didn&#x27;t ask for permission, I see no obligation to pay them. They can put the logo in context, sure, but if they end up spending more time on the sketches for that context than the logo itself, that isn&#x27;t what you ordered.

I was ready to fire the agency the moment the author mentioned they were going off script and building whatever they wanted. This was a huge, blinking red flag for me. Why would you keep paying someone when they&#x27;re doing work you didn&#x27;t ask for, doing work that doesn&#x27;t align with your goals, and ignoring what you say?

You know how, during a big programming project, you have to keep the devs from going &quot;this codebase has a lot of technical debt, let&#x27;s rebuild the whole thing using Rust and Kubernetes and Deno and move the hosting to Azure and switch databases and use microservices and...&quot;?Designers are exactly the same way. Just as technical fiddling is fun and interesting, making new designs from scratch is just as fun and interesting. And, just as fixing bugs is tedious and boring, tweaking designs is tedious and boring.I&#x27;ve been on both sides for a lot of years, and I have to keep a sharp eye on myself to keep from spinning my wheels on distractions.Even the Pope had to keep Michelangelo focused on the Sistine Chapel and not wander off to work on his tomb.

I regret my website redesign