Always love your writing, mtlynch. FWIW, I really do like the redesign. The logo is great, as are the illustrations. They obviously had a talented bunch, even if mismanaged. This is one of my fears with hiring freelancers, and why I really haven't done it so far. I could use the help, but I feel like it'd suck my time and wallet to get the results I'm after. Probably just haven't talked to the right one yet, if such a thing exists.
I worked as the dev lead for an ad agency in the past it always came down to sales under pricing, not listening to the team about what they thought costs would be. Like, "oh yeah, we can definitely build this complicated ecom site for $10k!" -- no way, mumbled the team. What you spent was pretty typical for a "$10k" project. And then frustrated clients would be due to PMs not being truthful about what the situation really is, spewing the same BS that sales sold them on.
Maybe that was the point, and the business model -- taking advantage of your clients? I wouldn't put it past them, at least when it came to the ad agency I worked for. It wasn't my favorite place to work, that's for sure. Constantly being over budget and past deadlines sucked.
Towards the end of my venture there, I almost always recommended using Shopify for any ecom project, to stay within the project's budget, instead of WooCommerce, Spree, or Magento (never again). Even if 9/10 times it didn't happen that way, I still made the recommendation.
But these days, a very simple ecom site could even be built by offloading onto Stripe Checkout, though I'd still probably go with Shopify to future-proof on product catalog growth.
Yeah, I agree about the talent, and that's something I didn't talk about in the post. I thought their design and engineering work was really good. If they had just kept pushing junk on me, it would have been an easier decision to walk away early. But they clearly had good people, and I wanted to figure out a way to work with them.
I worked as the dev lead for an ad agency in the past it always came down to sales under pricing, not listening to the team about what they thought costs would be. Like, "oh yeah, we can definitely build this complicated ecom site for $10k!" -- no way, mumbled the team. What you spent was pretty typical for a "$10k" project. And then frustrated clients would be due to PMs not being truthful about what the situation really is, spewing the same BS that sales sold them on.
Maybe that was the point, and the business model -- taking advantage of your clients? I wouldn't put it past them, at least when it came to the ad agency I worked for. It wasn't my favorite place to work, that's for sure. Constantly being over budget and past deadlines sucked.
Towards the end of my venture there, I almost always recommended using Shopify for any ecom project, to stay within the project's budget, instead of WooCommerce, Spree, or Magento (never again). Even if 9/10 times it didn't happen that way, I still made the recommendation.
But these days, a very simple ecom site could even be built by offloading onto Stripe Checkout, though I'd still probably go with Shopify to future-proof on product catalog growth.