I’ve taken on another client this week, yet another who’s web designer has just disappeared. When you are a new business or just want to save money, often one is tempted to hire a school leaver or someone without much experience to create your brand and/or website for you. It certainly saves money on the initial design, but what when they get a job, or just give up on web design entirely? It’s hard to reject people who have put all their time and energy into you and for a young man or woman, disappearing can be much easier than helping a client out of that mess.

Zako media has a number of options to spread payments or even cut costs, and we have backup systems in place. If we all died tomorrow, there are systems in place to ensure our clients are given an easy transition and don’t suffer because of it.

If you still want to use a cheaper alternative, please make sure the following are in place for your protection and to ensure things continue smoothly:

• Make sure your domain name is in your name and not that of your designer. Check on whois.net to find out. This means that your new designer/rescuer can easily walk you through the steps of regaining control.
• Make sure you know who your domain name is registered with. Even if your designer claims to host the site, often this is on reseller hosting and in his absence, we can go up the chain to the people who hold the actual hardware your website is stored on.
• Get control panel and/or FTP access to your site. This will enable your new web designer to get access to the code used on your site.
• If you can, backup your site regularly and store one each on and off-site for redundancy.

With these in place, it is usually much easier to regain control if the worse comes to the worse. Remember, your website is a business tool, a sales person and you should have control at all times.
If you do lose control of your site or your designer disappears, you can contact me directly on 0208 123 6609 or email me and we will go through the steps necessary to pull your site into somewhere you have access with or without the above information. We don’t usually charge for this process even if you don’t choose us to continue developing the site. This however depends on the size of the site and how easy it is to move. If it’s a large site and the details above are missing, it could take several hours to get something usable.

Alternatively, Derek Sorensen at Website Repairs can help, particularly if something on your site has stopped working.

Tags: designer, help, problems, Web Design, webmaster missing

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 27th, 2008 at 11:07 pm and is filed under Business, IT Security Tips, Web Design, Web Hosting, ecommerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.