While the OP says in the post that he's not a rube, this whole post makes me wince and shouts "rube". There's no reason in today's day and age to spend this muc

While the OP says in the post that he's not a rube, this whole post makes me wince and shouts "rube". There's no reason in today's day and age to spend this much or take this much time on a website "redesign", especially if you're a small business or one-person shop selling basically a consumer item. Agile methodology is key. Iterate quickly. Design / test / build quickly and iterate. Any long-term web design project is at high risk of being a waste of time and money. This has been an accepted best practices approach, especially for fast-moving projects for decades. It does seem like he learned his lesson and at the end he talks about how basically an iterative approach with lots of deliveries and low-cost testing is the best approach. And yes, it's the best-practice. But then again he learned an expensive lesson that if he had asked others about, would have gladly told him. Sometimes people need to learn lessons on their own with their own expense to realize that best practices apply to them, too. I find the lack of acceptance of methodology and best practices approaches very sad.