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This is good news to those of us that detest the way web design agencies work. These web design agencies only have themselves to blame. Far too often web design

This is good news to those of us that detest the way web design agencies work. These web design agencies only have themselves to blame. Far too often web design agencies see the finish line as the site going live. Actually, that is just the start. These web design agencies also under-bid and under-deliver, leaving the client at a loss for support. Even if they wanted support the web design agency are already on their next under-bid job that has to be churned out with no consideration of building a maintainable site. The other failure is the way these web design agencies work. Up until relatively recently all I was seeing was some PDF printouts drawn by some kid that learned how to do CMYK stuff vaguely in Photoshop at some second-rate educational facility. To hell with mobile, accessibility and all those things. Why use content when you can obliterate your clients copy with 'lorem boring ipsum' everywhere and totally ignore having engaging content that actually fits the boxes. Why have a homepage that can be easily updated by the client to suit their business needs to be always fresh when you can bake in something that looks pretty but doesn't have anything to do with the underlying information architecture of the client's copy? Typically these web design agencies also have micro managers on full time staff to then hire and fire developers to deliver the deliverables. These developers are always treated like mushrooms - kept in the dark - and what they deliver has to be a kludge. For instance, the kid armed with Photoshop that has put together the 'lorem ipsum' PDFs that the client has signed off on knows nothing of real design (how it works) so page headings float about all over the place from page to page, often with bespoke kerning that kind of insults the reader and the font designer. Therefore, frontend developer has no choice but to have about 432 lines of CSS just for H1 tags once the CSS has been compiled. There could be just the one H1 style for the whole site but the design process makes that totally impossible. These web design agencies with their micro-managers also play a game of Chinese Whispers. You know the deal - conference calls which take as long to get started as the actual meeting lasts, with everyone on the call except the guys doing the work. This then gets briefed down to the actual web developers with some drip feed that means the guys doing the actual work don't get to build something that has a 'systems approach' to it, instead everything is a kludge. For people that know nothing of 'git' I hope that there is absolutely no work for them, they should never have been wasting clients time in the first place, forever selling them snake oil and half baked 'solutions'. For those of us that do use ye-olde-version-control the future is as bright and busy now as it ever has been. My inbox is always full with people begging me to work for them. Too many companies have evolved from a normal business to a web business where all kinds of departments use the web for their actual needs. The website is core to their business and not some 'must have' add on that some daft agency has put together for them. Good on them for bringing talent on from in-house, these folk understand the business, the customers and the internal stake holders needs. This is what we do want to see, not this Chinese Whispers games with so-called web agencies that have useless micro-managers and totally undervalue genuine talent. I may sound a bit over-generalising but I have worked on both sides of the table, in-house and with these useless 'award winning' agencies. As well as these web design agencies I also hope these SEO companies die a quick death. Hours can be wasted with these folk agonising over links that nobody cares about, with them adding on turgid tracking stats javascript rubbish that doesn't deliver.

RobertKerans 11y ago
Yeah, that's harsh, but i've worked on both sides as well, and can't say you're wrong. Maybe there are some top-quality agencies building maintainable sites, but I'm yet to see any. Unless it's a throwaway, postcard-type site, design agencies seem a holdover from print, pre-internet, where that model worked. But lower end they're not needed, and once there are real things to do, I don't see how they can compete with internal teams that know the business and can build incrementally refined, VC controlled applications. I work for a big B2B company with a multitude of subcompanies, and maybe it's just bad experiences, but every agency-designed site we have is a badly-architectured piece of crap. Some look shiny, but they're all clearly rushed out, massively overpriced, and integrations with product databases/vendor systems/factory systems are close-to-impossible. And the latter part is key; building UI over those is the key part of my job, I'm designing interfaces to allow people to buy things easily, and agencies don't seem to be geared toward interfaces, rather they're set up to make pretty pictures.
RobertKerans 11y ago
Yeah, that's harsh, but i've worked on both sides as well, and can't say you're wrong. Maybe there are some top-quality agencies building maintainable sites, but I'm yet to see any. Unless it's a throwaway, postcard-type site, design agencies seem a holdover from print, pre-internet, where that model worked. But lower end they're not needed, and once there are real things to do, I don't see how they can compete with internal teams that know the business and can build incrementally refined, VC controlled applications. I work for a big B2B company with a multitude of subcompanies, and maybe it's just bad experiences, but every agency-designed site we have is a badly-architectured piece of crap. Some look shiny, but they're all clearly rushed out, massively overpriced, and integrations with product databases/vendor systems/factory systems are close-to-impossible. And the latter part is key; building UI over those is the key part of my job, I'm designing interfaces to allow people to buy things easily, and agencies don't seem to be geared toward interfaces, rather they're set up to make pretty pictures.

RobertKerans 11y ago

Yeah, that's harsh, but i've worked on both sides as well, and can't say you're wrong. Maybe there are some top-quality agencies building maintainable sites, but I'm yet to see any. Unless it's a throwaway, postcard-type site, design agencies seem a holdover from print, pre-internet, where that model worked. But lower end they're not needed, and once there are real things to do, I don't see how they can compete with internal teams that know the business and can build incrementally refined, VC controlled applications. I work for a big B2B company with a multitude of subcompanies, and maybe it's just bad experiences, but every agency-designed site we have is a badly-architectured piece of crap. Some look shiny, but they're all clearly rushed out, massively overpriced, and integrations with product databases/vendor systems/factory systems are close-to-impossible. And the latter part is key; building UI over those is the key part of my job, I'm designing interfaces to allow people to buy things easily, and agencies don't seem to be geared toward interfaces, rather they're set up to make pretty pictures.

RobertKerans 11y ago