Take control of your website

Without mentioning any names, one of our clients is in a frustrating situation that manage my website is trying to sort out.

They're a small business with 4 divisions, around 8 website domain names and 4 individual websites. Their problem? Each website has been designed by a different agency or freelancer, each is hosted separately, and our client is desperately trying to get hold of the vital information manage my website needs to gain control of the whole lot and then be able to "do what we say on the tin", so to speak.

The lesson here is that it's extremely important to ensure you ask your web people to give you all the contact details, URLs, usernames and passwords for your websites, content management systems, email accounts and hosting services to ensure that if anything ever goes wrong, you'll be in the position to get it fixed quickly and with minimum fuss. You don't need to do anything with this information other than log it somewhere very secure, preferably in multiple locations, and make sure it's at hand if needs be.

Imagine if one day you decide you'd like to change a few images on your homepage, and add a news page to your website. You try and contact your web designer, only to find they've emigrated to Australia and haven't left a forwarding address. You're stuck.

Even worse, imagine if you've bought an existing business along with their websites, and after the settling in period you decide to tackle updating and developing them. Have you been told who designed and built your sites? Are these people easy to contact? Do you have all the information you need?

Here are a few questions you need to ask yourself:

• Who do you contact if your website stops working?
• Who legally owns your domain name?
• When is your domain name due for renewal?
• If you need to make backups or update and develop your website, do you know how to access your website files?
• Does your web hosting company offer automatic daily backup services and is this included in your contract?
• When does your web hosting contract expire?
• How much disk space is included in your web hosting package and how much of it is remaining?

You need to make sure you know all about the providers, contacts and resources necessary to keep your website running like clockwork.

To learn more about gaining 'remote control' of your websites, please feel free to contact us.