The Do's and Don'ts of working with a web designer

This page of Do's and Don'ts is designed to help you, the business owner, avoid some of the pitfalls other business owners have experienced. These cautions are presented based on our own experiences in trying to help actual business owners unravel the webs in which they find themselves entangled after working with a web designer.

What YOU should do!

Secure your own domain name.

The domain name you finally decide on for your business can become a valuable business asset. It is imperative that YOU secure your own domain name, maintain it and control it. No web designer should have control over this business asset. This means the domain should be in your name and YOU should have the password, account number or user name for the domain. YOU should be the only person who can change any information associated with your domain name, and YOU should take full responsibility for renewing your domain name and keeping it paid up and active at all times.

One of our clients paid a web designer/hosting company for 10 years of domain registration in advance. When we got involved in the situation, all domain names owned by this business owner were set to expire in one to two years. In other words, the web designer took the 10 years of registration money but only paid for two years. This business owner is now faced with trying to get the money back from the designer or just paying it again to the domain registration company.

We have made reserving your Domain name very easy. You can research and reserve your domain name by clicking here. YOU maintain the user name and password for your Domain name and you pay the fees direct. You maintain complete control over this valuable business asset.

Secure your own hosting company.

Choosing the right company to host your domain name is probably the most important decision you will make concerning your web site, mainly because you are setting up a long-term relationship. The hosting company should have the following qualifications:

Verifiable history of up-time
Posted price list with a description of what you are getting for that price
Reliable customer service help via phone and e-mail
Reliable technical help via phone, e-mail and web site
Readily available instructions for configuring forms and e-mail for your site
A system for notifying you if changes are made to the server that affect your site

A recent experience we went through with a business owner involved a situation where the web designer did not even tell the owner who the host was (he was a "re-seller" for web hosting and put it with his company). Plus this designer put the hosting under the business name but set himself up as the "guarantor" of the account and was the only person with the user name or password for the site. Fortunately in this case, this was discovered before the site was actually uploaded to the server so a new host could be found before losing the web site content. If this designer had been kept on board long enough to build the site and upload it, this owner would be entirely at his mercy.

Another business owner we worked with had a host but neither e-mails or phone calls were ever answered. The phone would ring and ring but no one would answer. E-mails from both the owner and us were totally ignored. So communication with this host was non-existent--an impossible situation to work under. The host you choose is very important to the success of your site so choose wisely.

We have made securing your Hosting Plan very easy. You can research and sign up for the perfect Hosting Plan by clicking here. We have done the research for you and think you will be pleased, not only with the quality of the service but also the price. We will work with you to choose the Plan you need for your particular business. You stay in charge of reserving your hosting plan, and YOU are the one with the password and user name. As a business owner, you should have total control over your hosting account.

Insist on a backup copy of everything on your server

After you have gone to all the time and effort to get your information up on a web site, you are entitled to a backup copy of that site. This includes your web pages, your images, and all other parts of the site, including the navigational bars, forms, animations, etc. This not only protects the web designer in case the server and his/her machine goes down at the same time but it also prevents you from being held "hostage" to your web host.

The way this can happen is best illustrated by a recent experience we went through with a business owner. The web hosting company took the server down for several days without notice to the web site owners. Then the server was re-activated and e-mails were sent out that the server had been sold and that a new requirement was that every web site on the server had to pay a year's hosting in advance or they could no longer be hosted by the company. Since the business owner we were working with did not have a backup copy of their web site and had no idea how to access the site or transfer it to another host, they paid the one year in advance hosting fees. If they had not done this, their entire investment in their original web site (approximately $10,000) would have been lost.

Learn how to ftp information to and from your site.

This may sound a little technical but it really isn't. With the right software, it is as easy as double clicking on a file to get it downloaded or uploaded. While I do not recommend a business owner uploading anything to the site except to special directories, downloading a copy of your site is very easy to do. It is also much more efficient to upload an entire roll of images to a special directory on your server rather than sending them by e-mail to your designer. Your designer can then download the images, do whatever needs to be done to get them web ready and then re-upload them to the server. It is a simple process and one we will teach you if you choose us to do your designing. Just don't ever delete files from your server or your web site may no longer be visitble.

Keep your web site up to date.

We sometimes get asked to just "teach me how to do simple changes to my site". If you have a lot of experience in web work, you might be able to do this just fine. But for most folks, this is an impossible task. You will need to purchase software, at least three different kinds and you will have to learn the html coding requirements for the web as well as a host of other requirements.. Of all the experiences you can have on the web, this can be the most frustrating as it is very easy to find yourself in one "fix" after another which appear to have no solutions.

We recommend letting a professional web designer design your site, get it up and operating on the web. This puts all the "problems" on their shoulders. Then, if you want to make changes to the site, we recommend using our new Web Editor. With our new Web Editor, making changes to your site can be very convenient and easy to do. Click here to investigate our new Web Editor Plan. For a monthly fee, you have access to and can make changes to your entire site as long as you have access to a computer with internet access.