If a £1000 item is advertised in a bricks and mortar store as being £100. A shopper may basket it and approach the checkout. The £100 price tag is not actually the retailer ‘offering to sell’ for this price, it is merely an ‘invitation to treat’. No contract is formed until you reach the till. An incorrect price on an item is therefore not legally binding. However, when the cashier asks for an amount of money in exchange for the goods you are intending to buy, he is making his offer and the consumer chooses to accept, negotiate or decline this offer. If the consumer accepts and hands over the money, a contract is established.

If a product is mispriced on the till however, this becomes the offer which a shopper can capitalise on regardless of the advertised price.

So what happens online? When something is mispriced on your ecommerce site and payments are automated?

When a consumer buys online, they rarely reach a human being who could spot the error. If you list an item at £100 which should be £1000, your customer will reach the checkout with only £100 in their basket to pay. Your website then makes the offer for the customer to accept or decline. This offer will contain the wrong price and the order will be placed, money will change hands and the contract has been formed. There is nothing you can do but dispatch or potentially face a lawsuit.

However there is a way to protect yourself, ignoring the terms and conditions, if the customer is told that their order has been accepted, whether on screen or by email; the sale contract is formed. Both you and the customer have accepted the deal and any attempt to cancel their order could be seen as a breach of contract.

However in this instance, we miss an opportunity to enter another contract (or amendment to the standard buy/sell contract). This contract is contained in your terms and conditions which a shopper should be forced to agree to as part of the purchasing process. In these terms and conditions many retailers get around the above problem by stating that no order has been accepted until dispatch and that payment will only ensure receipt of the offer but not the agreement of that offer. (Do not try to copy and paste this expecting it to be legally watertight as I’m a web developer not a lawyer.)

In other words the process has been re-ordered slightly. The customer is now being invited to treat, he then makes the offer to pay £100 for the items and it is up to the order processing staff or system to agree, negotiate or decline. This gives you the chance to intercept and correct.

It is therefore important that any post-payment messages on your website do not state that an order has been accepted. Emails and post-pay messages should declare that the order has been received or acknowledged and your terms and conditions should state why.

Human error is common, if you sell products or services online, don’t get caught out!

The inspiration for this article from Yahoo! Finance with real life examples can be found here (http://uk NULL.finance NULL.yahoo NULL.com/news/your-rights-when-stores-mis-price-items NULL.html)

A mass trend has hit the Internet, it sneaked in so subtly it almost went unnoticed.

The problem: The Internet is truly free, there is little or nothing you can’t get for free. Do you write standard fill-in-the-blanks legal documents? I can download them from docstoc. Do you write your own music? I can download via piratebay. Do you create websites? I can get a free one with Microsoft…

This has been damaging for so many industries, but now they’re actually playing the system and making a mint… how?

Solution: Microcharging.

iTunes are fully aware that MP3′s can be downloaded for free, albeit illegally. They came in with low low costs for singles and even less if you buy the whole album. MP3s can be downloaded for 79p! 10 years ago, I could buy a single for around £4 so that’s a big improvement. Who wouldn’t pay 79p to stay on the right side of the law for a track they liked?

Facebook charge for little graphic images, and little adverts. The majority of these cost around $1… it’s pocket money… of course who are the target market?

Digital photo printing generally costs 10-50p per print. 10-50p and the wait for delivery is well worth not having to fiddle with the printer, top up the ink and sort out paper jams, what a bargain.

Nintendo Wii. You can purchase wii points in blocks of 1000 for £7.50. For that you can download games which are now available for free online. Of course you can’t put them on your wii without a small cover charge.

In the US, mobile users pay to receive an SMS message. Twitter are cashing on to this with their mobile alerts (and a cushy deal with the networks. Which is why they stopped in the UK, here the billing is the other way round losing twitter money)

The list goes on.

Do you have something that doesn’t decrease when sold? eBooks, help-sheets, anonymous questionnaire data? These are great places to start as they require little or no action from you per sale.

Naturally this system works on volume, but with the right product(s), 1000 downloads at £1 each… I won’t insult intelligence by showing you the answer… you get the picture. If run through Paypal, your users won’t even have to hunt for their wallets (assuming they have an account)

Is microcharging the missing link in social networking sites? Is it the missing link to Twitter’s fortunes? How else could we use microcharging as individuals or a collective?

As the self-assessment deadline draws closer, thousands of business are being hit with an email, supposedly from the tax office claiming they are owed a rebate. HMRC describe it as ”the most sophisticated and prolific scam” they’ve had to deal with and would like to remind people that HMRC will only ever offer rebates by post.

HMRC are receiving around 500 of these emails forwarded by customers. Taxpayers are being asked either to leave their bank details or to call a premium rate number which will charge them around £6 per minute as they hold for a reply.

From HMRC: “We only ever contact customers who are due a refund in writing by post,” said a spokesman for HMRC. “We never use emails, telephone calls or external companies in these circumstances, and it is very important that anyone receiving it does not reply or provide any personal details whatsoever.”

Another fantastic website related blog from one of our favourite Copywriting sites; Copyblogger.com (http://feeds NULL.copyblogger NULL.com/~r/Copyblogger/~3/359509499/). This one talks about the psychology of passive selling, a sales method which all business websites work with no matter how well the website design is done where visitors are anonymous and make the most of that fact. Copyblogger I found fairly recently but after reading from article to article I found much of the content was well worth noting. They state facts and give advice to website owners and marketing alike and make the most of those facts… Anyway waffle over as per article, the blog starts here:

Have you ever stood in a store with something in your hand and then looked up to see if there was a clerk nearby you could ask for help?

Sure you have. We all have. Good help is hard to find.

Companies have been cutting costs by moving towards self-serve more than ever. Depending on where you live, you may have to bag your own groceries, pump your own gas, or bottle your own water.

Put yourself in the mind of the consumer. Consider what happens at that very moment you realize you need help. You were focused on buying two seconds ago, but then something happened—something very important.

Your brain skipped a beat.

“Find someone,” it said.

“Don’t buy. You have questions. Get answers.”

Your focus shifts. You aren’t thinking about buying anymore at all. You were almost ready to shell out your money, but now you’re in search mode. Now you’re seeking answers.

“Hello… Can anyone help me? Anyone at all?”

Now, think about your website. There are no clerks. No sales associate lingers nearby. The store aisles are empty and the cashiers are gone. There is no one who can help – not immediately, anyways.

The copy on your website is the single solution. Useful content mixed with meaningful messages is the only salesperson on staff. If your site content isn’t meeting, greeting, and convincing people, then it isn’t doing its job.

You need more than a website… you need a website that sells.

And to help you sell more, here are seven copywriting tips for a website that operates like a well-staffed store:

1. Get a professional salesperson – Overexcited content full of exclamation marks and sunshine-bright enthusiasm very often has the opposite effect of calm, confident copy. It just doesn’t work well. Tone down the cheerleading and collect your wits.
2. Eliminate the dress code – Calm and collected doesn’t mean bland and boring. It’s fine to show some personality, so get naked with your content. In fact, most consumers enjoy a good peep show (minus the pom-poms, that is).
3. Tell staff to talk less– Readers quickly lose interest in long, verbose paragraphs and end up walking away. No one likes the guy who can’t shut up, after all. Trim your content. Use concise sentences that create impact – not unnecessary fluff.
4. Inform consumers better – Tell consumers about your company. They want to know your story – the way they want to hear it. What makes you special? Why should they choose you? What can you offer more than the competition?
5. Bring in the specialist – The quality of your content reflects on your business image. If it isn’t well written, it isn’t going to help you sell. Do-it-yourself copywriting is fine for people with the skills. But if that isn’t you, then hire a writer to help.
6. Hire a clerk – Make sure people can contact you quickly and easily with a visible contact form. Ditch the coded (emails) supposed (to) cut spam, as well. That just forces consumers to take extra steps to contact you – steps they may not be interested in taking. There are other ways of verifying that a user is human without having to type out badly displayed letters!
7. Don’t goof off on the job – There’s a time and place for playing the class clown. Snagging a customer lead isn’t that time. Give straightforward information, offer a clear message and cut the clowning around.

Ending here, I would also like to mention a related article from the same blog entitled: ‘I don’t care about you’ (http://www NULL.copyblogger NULL.com/who-cares/) which in principal states that your website viewers want to find out how you can solve their problem and don’t want to sit reading about how wonderful you say you are!

Identity theft is big business! With the information sharing age upon us, should we take steps to start the information restriction age to protect our online identities from theft? More and more of our business and personal practices are online. We make payments online, transfer and recieve large quantities of money online. Our banks are online. Facebook, Linkedin, Bebo, Ecademy, Twitter users have much of their personalities online. Websites simply aren’t protecting our online identities (http://news NULL.google NULL.co NULL.uk/news?q=website%20hacked&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org NULL.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&sa=N&tab=wn) the way they should be, and the law doesn’t want to know, so we have to take matters into our own hands!

This is by no means a definitive list so please do add ideas into the comments if there’s anything you feel should be added.

Basic steps to protect your identity online:

Passwords:

First and easiest route for online identity theft is the human element; passwords. I can access my business bank account with a single username and password and that scares me, but it doesn’t have to. To obtain this information, an identity thief can use 3 methods:

1. Know what I like and try to guess the password based on my interests, relationships, date of birth. (all of which can be obtained through facebook!)SOLUTION: Do not choose easily guessable passwords (and no S1m0n isn’t much more secure than Simon when using real words)
2. If I use the same password for more than one service, someone gets hold of the password for one system and can access another. This can happen by signing in to an untrusted website where they’re not asking for money but you do need to register. It can happen by a legitimate website being hacked or it could even be overheard or abused when you’re in a hotel foyer, calling home directing your friend or PA into your email to get your booking details.
   
   SOLUTION: Use a different password for different websites.Alternatively use one secure password for the secure sites and lesser passwords for lesser sites. i.e. my business and personal banks have the same password. My hotmail account (used for junk only) and facebook account use another.
3. The Brute Force or dictionary attack uses random characters or known words with and without numbers to keep guessing. This is done automatically and can guess around 10,000 possible combinations in an day. If your password happens to be in a dictionary with or without numbers no matter how obscure, the password will be guessed within a few hours. If you had a long random list of numbers and letters, it could take weeks or even months. Some websites lock out after a few guesses to try and prevent it, but most don’t.SOLUTION: Choose passwords as randomly as possible but it needs to be memorable!

   One tip I’ve heard for helping to keep passwords obscure for both computers and humans is to anacronym it. For example, I could have the password: MWCFMAICFMK based on the phrase: “My wife comes from Mauritius and I come from Milton Keynes” It makes it random but memorable for someone who knows this keyphrase. Add some numbers in there to increase randomness and you’re laughing. The common way is to change similar letters and numbers. (for example the letter i becomes the number one) This can help but don’t rely on it 100%.

   Finished Password: mwcfm41cfmk (12 characters)

Forgotten Passwords

Ok my password is secure. The second route into less secure sites is hitting the ‘Forgotten password’ button. Some ask simple information (mothers maiden name, date of birth etc.) before emailing them to the account in your profile, some just email, some will allow a complete password reset and only email to confirm giving immediate but limited access. You therefore need to protect your mother’s maiden name, and your date of birth. The trouble is that this information isn’t all that hard to get hold of!

Solutions? When you’re asked for your date of birth and mother’s maiden name on non-trusted sites and where lying isn’t going to be called fraud, lie. Use a date of birth and name which means nothing realistically to you but which only you know as being your backup details. This way people who know your real DOB won’t be able to gain access.  Obviously when applying for credit, insurance etc. you have a legal obligation to provide your real details but these tend to be more secure.

Post-it Notes

One of the biggest no-goes in the history of computers! Never, under any circumstances, at all, ever write down your passwords on a post-it note and stick it to your monitor! The back of your desk diary is the second most common place to write it. This can be as helpful as sending a mass email with all your passwords to your friends, IT repairman, next door neighbour’s son who helps you every time you get a virus etc etc etc…

If you need to write your access details down at any point, you need to keep this as secure as the original information. Don’t label it ‘Passwords’ don’t leave it within easy and obvious access from the PC. write the actual password element backwards. Anyone who tried it the normal way will assume it’s out of date and give up. My sheet with the password above would read:

Hotmail:
simon@hotmail.com
kmfc14mfcwm

The Computer :

While we’re working in the office, the next thing to keep secure is the computer. Make sure you have a good anti-virus. AVG is one of the best I’ve ever used in the last 10 years, and they do have a free version for domestic use (http://free.avg.com/) How will this help?

Some of the worse virus’ and programs you can have on your PC are the ones that don’t do anything visibly. Some can sit there logging everything you type (usernames, letters, passwords, emails, credit card numbers) and send them off to the originator to decode. A good virus scan should keep these out and keep you safe.

Some people also recommend lavasoft’s adaware too to run every so often. This helps catch things which aren’t specifically classed as virus’s but can be damaging. Don’t be alarmed when you see the number of things it will find, to be on the safe side, it removes everything which could track what you’re doing including internet cookies which are very limited and don’t really do anything bad besides help record that you’re logged into a site but doesn’t give away passwords. Their free version is here: http://lavasoft.com/products/ad_aware_free.php

The websites

The websites themselves can also be quite weak. When you sign up with a site or make a payment, it’s illegal for the website owner to store your credit card details and certain others without a minimum level of security… but who enforces laws on the internet? Only use trusted websites with a proven track record to give your more private details to.  If you don’t trust them or there’s doubt, signup for a free hotmail or yahoo email address and use that for these sites only. If you’re likely to get one email and nothing more, consider using Temporary Inbox (http://www NULL.temporaryinbox NULL.com/)

Facebook

Facebook and other social networking sites can cause a real threat. Just this week, a security threat lead to users details being exposed. (read about the latest facebook security hole here (http://www NULL.nzherald NULL.co NULL.nz/section/story NULL.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10522098))

The truth is that most data handed out has to have been given in the first place. Try using your secondary date of birth, mother’s maiden name etc. and ONLY put information on the world wide web which you want everyone on the world wide web to see! It doesn’t matter that people can or can’t see your date of birth as all someone has to do is scan through your wall or public messages and look for the abundance of ‘Happy Birthday’ messages from your friends and family and look at the date of posting!

Scam and Spam

Occasionally you will probably receive notifications of account closures or emails requesting you to click a link and log in. DON’T! If there is a doubt, go to the website in question manually, do not use the links provided if you then have to insert your password details. This is known as Phishing. They can divert you to their own website made to look like your bank, paypal etc encouraging you to log in. If you get an email from Natwest requesting that you log in, open your browser, go to www.natwest.com and log in there. According to Sophos, only 1 in 28 emails are actually legitimite. (http://it NULL.tmcnet NULL.com/topics/it/articles/34277-only-one-28-emails-legitimate-sophos-report-reveals NULL.htm)

Making Payments

Many of my clients want to take payments online and always scoff at the idea of offering paypal payments. Paypal is a good system with the buyer in mind.They do have higher than average charges but personally I feel you get value for money. They are at the end of the day, just another website, but they are big enough and their whole purpose of being is around security. Without that, the whole business would collapse overnight!

As I said at the beginning, this is not a definitive list but contains all the most relevent and basic things to know about putting your information online. It’s a lawless society which is slowly dominating our lives and should be treated with care!

Ever wondered how to make money while on holiday? Most service providers ask this question every day. When you are not present, the business effectively pauses, your income stops but your bills continue to fly through the post every month. Is there a way to turn your knowledge into a real salable product? A product which sells itself while you take a break, go away, recover from illness? Before you answer that question, let me tell you about ebookplace:

Zako Media has teamed up with copywriters, search engine optimisers, marketeers and together we have put together the ULTIMATE ebook package. Using our individual expert knowledge and project managed by a single point of contact, we can help you with all aspects of ebooks from the initial concept, right up to taking your automated payments through automatic distribution.

We’ve also setup ebookplace A free community that is totally focussed on eBooks and other digital products. (http://ebookplace NULL.ning NULL.com) This community is ideal for people who have never written an eBook, and equally suited to seasoned eBook experts. You can explore eBook marketing ideas, share your eBook experiences, demonstrate your eBook knowledge, take part in eBook discussions, and if you are new to eBooks, ask all those eBook related questions that you were dying to ask.

But what have you got to write about?

Share your business knowledge, share your personal experiences, perhaps your recovery path through terminal illness, inspirational passages or poetry. Not everyone can afford your consultancy fees and you’re not willing to drop your prices that low, how about offering an alternative? Add worksheets to help them on their way.

If you think there’s a market for it, go onto ebookplace, talk to the growing community and find out. Don’t know how to write, market and sell? That’s where we can step in to give you a helping hand.

The quality ebook market is continuing to grow, don’t let that book stagnate inside you

With the ever growing online communities and reliance on the internet, it might make sense to say ‘Yes! You need a website’. Ask a web designer/developer for a website and that’s exactly what you’ll get. But do you really need it?

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say ‘Yes, everyone needs an online presence‘ but this does not have to be in the form of a whole website. So what are the alternatives?

Blogs:- A blog (short for WebLog) is a great content building site. You can get these for free from wordpress, blogger among others. A blog allows you to post articles like the one you’re reading now. They’re great if you’re a consultant with lots of advice like time-management, marketing etc, or in a constantly changing industry like accountancy or technology.

Network Stores:- If you sell products online, have a look at trading on eBay stores or Amazon. Both of these provide seller services for a small transaction fee. One of my clients receives about £2/3000 per month turnover through an eBay store.

Network Profiles:- Many people make do with networking profiles like Ecademy, Facebook, Xing, LinkedIn, Workology, and these work great, particularly for B2B and some B2C businesses. Spend the time making your profile stand out from the croud and socialise with the other members.

Directory listings:- These are a good quick-fix particularly for B2C’s, Plumbers, electricians, Taxi companies. They provide a good geographical listing and helpe people compare you to your competitors.

There are others but I feel these allow you to stay focussed on the business rather than the social aspect. If you feel I’ve missed any, feel free to add them into the comments below.

Brilliant article written by Guy Levine. Original text here (http://www NULL.realbusiness NULL.co NULL.uk/news/internet-business/5262191/seo-versus-paid-search-engine-marketing-round-one NULL.thtml). He explains the difference between SEO and Adwords, that both are good, but when to effectively apply them.

Welcome to the great debate: “Do I pay every time someone clicks on one of my little adverts on Google, ranging from 5p to £25 per click, or do I hire an expert to dominate the natural listings (the free ones on the left hand side)?” Guy Levine. chief executive of Web Marketing Advisor, gives us the lowdown.

Pay per click, Google adwords, search engine marketing and sponsored listings are all names for pay per click. You choose a word or phrase you want, you bid a price, then an advert is displayed when someone types the word or phrase into Google. When someone clicks, you pay.

Search engine optimisation – or SEO to the cool young internet types – is the process of inducing “Google love”. Basically, tweaking the pages of a website to make the search engines love them. I know there are other search engines, but at the moment Big G rules!

On the other hand, pay per click allows hungry entrepreneurs to have their websites ranking on the front page of search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) within as little as three hours. Yes, you have to pay but you get visibility. Another great benefit is that you can run multiple adverts, all 128 characters of them, to test the best hooks. Google will even tell you which one people love the most.

Search engine optimisation is the long game. You tweak your site, you wait for the search engines to update their listings, you tweak again, you wait. Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you get it wrong. But boy, when you get it right! The first result on page one is better than the icing on the cake, it’s internet nirvana.

Let me share one word of warning. It’s fine being number one, but you need to make sure you are number one for a word which people search when they want to buy, not just browse.

SEO, I love it, but my best advice is to always run a PPC campaign first. Choose your keywords, test them and make sure your site converts. When it does, crank up the SEO.

Get them both right and there’s gold there in them there hills!

Guy Levine is the chief executive of search engine optimisation firm (http://www NULL.webmarketingadvisor NULL.com/) Web Marketing Advisor.

April 23rd was Tim O-Reilly’s keynote speech at the Web 2.0 Expo. For those who aren’t aware, Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media and supporter of open-source and free software first coined the phrase ‘Web 2.0′ in 2005 and is now pushing Web 3.0. So if Mr. O’Reilly invented it, we start with Tim to tell us what it is.

What is Web 2.0 and What is Web 3.0?

As the terminology’s founder, Tim was the man to listen to, but as he finished explaining his definition of web 3.0, I wasn’t the only person to come to a stark realisation. His definition for Web 2.0 was nearly identical to his definition of Web 3.0… Could it be true that even he doen’t know what it means?

Going back to Tim O’Reilly’s widely used and accepted definition for Web 2.0 circa 2006:

“Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.”

In short; The web 2.0 is a platform which should be used to display collective user input. This theoretically means that Facebook, Wikipedia, MySpace, Ecademy are all ‘Web 2.0 applications’

Looking towards Tim’s Web 3.0 definition (a point to note is that this definition was released before the Web 2.0 definition)

Recently, whenever people ask me “What is Web 3.0?” I’ve been saying that it’s when we apply all the principles we’re learning about aggregating human-generated data and turning it into collective intelligence, and apply that to sensor-generated (machine-generated) data.

So in short; The web 3.0 is a platform which should be used to display collective user input. This theoretically means that Facebook, Wikipedia, MySpace, Ecademy are all ‘Web 3.0 applications’

Finally, Tim’s Web 2.0 definition on slide during his speech read:

• The Internet is the platform
• Harnessing the collective intelligence
• Data as the “Intel Inside”
• Software above the level of a single device
• Software as a service

O’Reilly is talking about both Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 as taking user-generated data and turning it into user-facing services, and there seems to be a great deal of overlap between the two!

My theory is that the Web is just the Web. It is forever changing and evolving through user and designer input, but ultimately it’s the same web with more or less the same capabilities. A few clever websites and technologies have popped up over the years but do they really set a standard for the web as a whole? Does my local plumber need a website which allows complete social networking and Web 2.0 or Web 3.0 technologies? PlumberReunited.com may or may not have a market. Facebook, Ecademy and the likes are businesses providing a service, and they do it well. It doesn’t mean the web has stepped up a version, it simply means some clever clogs started new businesses and are using the current Web in whatever version to monetise on them.

Turning user input into data has been around for as long as I can remember. Sure, back then it was more complicated but we’ve been using online forums for many many years, Facebook just takes a forum and with computer speeds and broadband has more doors opened in terms of what information can be shared in a reasonable amount of time.

“The points of contrast [between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0] are actually the same points that I used to distinguish Web 2.0 from Web 1.5. (I’ve always said that Web 2.0 = Web 1.0, with the dot com bust being a side trip that got it wrong.),” wrote O’Reilly last Autumn.

So in other words, this version separation of the Web is just a waste of time, and the inventor of this terminology seems to agree.

So What is Web 2.0? and What is Web 3.0

In my opinion, and that of many others, Web 2.0 and web 3.0 do not exist and I feel that Tim is one of those ‘others’. They are there to make us feel inferior for not knowing and not using this ‘new’ technology and new systems.

As one ‘on the other hand’ comment however, the discussion of Web 2.0, Web 3.0 etc has sparked much controversy about where the internet is going on a general scale. Controversy always leads to discussion and has brought about many more ideas which will drive us forward with how we use the internet and what we use it for.

Remember when that first website asked you for your credit card details? I bet, like most people you were very skeptical and reluctant to pass this information to the stranger on the other side. Now, in the UK alone, online transactions were worth £12.8bn last year! We’re becoming equally comfortable transferring funds from bank account to bank account online. We’re filing our tax returns online and without the internet, most of us would be forced to leave our offices or homes to reconnect elsewhere.

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 (http://www NULL.whois NULL.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 (http://www NULL.websiterepairs NULL.net/) can help, particularly if something on your site has stopped working.
(http://www NULL.websiterepairs NULL.net/)