Check out this article in Business Week Online. It’s about a well-intentioned company being suckered by an evil web designer who registered their domains in his name, and then made off without satisfactorily completing their sites. To date, the company is stuck with two websites that cannot be updated and paints a poor reflection of their business.

I found this story quite disturbing, especially since I’ve actually met a designer who operates like this. The argument is whether the designer or design team should be allowed to register the domain names under their ownership.

At World Wide Creative, we made two critical decisions a few years back:

• There would be no contractual agreement over an extended period. Should a client, for whatever reason, want to leave, they could do so.
• Our clients own the domains.

I cannot understand what makes someone want to lock an unhappy client into a contract. Imagine a restauranteur having guests and then locking them in the restaurant after they complained.  Surely, if the relationship goes sour for any reason you’d want to let them leave, if they chose to?