[Vanderson]

You said you'd next time go with a freelancer as one of your solutions. I'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:

> 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 / 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't really like the results as much as their own ideas.

[mtlynch]

Thanks for reading!

>You said you'd next time go with a freelancer as one of your solutions. I'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.

>>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.

Yeah, I think it's important to be vigilant to some degree, but some people are effective at suggesting useful improvements. TinyPilot'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'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.

[Vanderson]

To be clear, I agree with your assessment and I would not recommend an agency unless you are a huge company as well. It's a mis-match of interests and goals.

The work I did as a web programmer for an agency (freelance) was similarly imbalanced with many "leaders" telling me what to do, (ie, project lead heavy, 1 designer, 1 programmer) and it was a mess and I won't bother with it again.

[dangus]

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's the kind of stuff that can't possibly take weeks and weeks.

The author doesn't need a website design, this site is totally fine with a generic SquareSpace/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't need anything that a simple generic page can't handle.