Imprisoned by Your Website Designer?

When the economy gets tough, many website designers (small business owners themselves) simply go out of business.

Don’t allow your business to be held hostage. Protect yourself. You need to have access to all your files before your website designer disappears.

When we design websites for our clients, we always give them the following information immediately after the site is complete.

Use this checklist to get control of your website for the future:

1. Login information for the hosting company control panel.
2. FTP login information.
3. Blog login information.
4. Email address login information for each email account (you may have more than one email address for your domain, such as sales@domain.com or mary@domain.com or info@domain.com).
5. Other login information to auxiliary software, like membership software, forum software, content management systems, etc.
6. Logins for Google Analytics and Google Adwords, if you use either of these services.
7. A copy of all your website coding, graphic, audio, video and animation files, including the original source files for all your graphics.
8. Written confirmation that YOU own the content of the website.

For security purposes, if your website designer disappears, change ALL login IDs and passwords on your accounts. If you have given your website designer your credit card information, you may wish to cancel the card and have a new number re-issued.